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When Riccardo Tisci took over as Burberry's chief creative officer in 2018, his first public signal came before any collection: a new logo and identity by Peter Saville, the designer known for Factory Records sleeves for Joy Division and New Order.

The all-caps serif wordmark from 1999 was replaced with a heavy, bold sans serif, and the Equestrian Knight emblem was set aside. Alongside it came an interlocking TB monogram, after founder Thomas Burberry, which Tisci said on Instagram was drawn from a 1908 monogram. Saville turned it into a repeat pattern in coral red, honey beige and white. Vogue reported the logo was designed in four weeks, and Tisci shared his email exchanges with Saville in his Instagram stories.

Saville told Dezeen the old logotype suited the trench coat's utilitarian nature, and called the new one a complete step-change pointing to Burberry's twenty-first-century cultural coordinates. Vogue noted it was his third fashion rebrand in a few years, after work such as Calvin Klein's minimalist logo for Raf Simons.

Critics were less impressed. The Drum's headline said that in aspiring to simplicity Burberry had ended up with basic. It also proved short-lived. In February 2023 new chief creative officer Daniel Lee brought back the Equestrian Knight and a serif wordmark, as Design Week reported. Saville later told Dezeen that replacing an identity so quickly was totally and utterly irresponsible, though he said he liked Lee's design.

Saville later explained the brief to The Guardian. The logo did not need fixing; the house was simply changing under Riccardo Tisci, who succeeded a designer of 17 years. Tisci's key insight, as Saville recounted it, was that finding the right Burberry for a trench coat label is easy, but putting the same word on a chiffon blouse is not. Saville called the name a gift, with interesting letters, and described the result as sitting between the institutional and the cult. Business of Fashion tracked the rollout as an Instagram teaser campaign, with the monogram on a giant teddy bear in Shanghai, a Seoul storefront and New York beach parasols before Tisci's first show.

This is where fashion's flat, heavy sans serif wave became impossible to ignore. On its own the wordmark is anonymous. The monogram does the real work, giving Tisci a printable heritage device. That Lee's first move was to bring the knight back says the old symbol had more life in it than 2018 assumed.