The encyclopedia · Advertising & PR · Marketing decision · 2019
Burberry's Chinese New Year family portrait looked like a horror movie poster
Burberry's first Lunar New Year campaign featured a grim, grey family portrait with nobody smiling. Weibo called it creepy and compared it to a horror film.
Burberry
What happened
In January 2019, ahead of the February 5 Lunar New Year, Burberry released its first-ever Chinese New Year campaign, titled 'Modern New Year' (摩登新禧). The campaign featured a family-portrait-style image of eight models of different generations standing together against a grey backdrop. Chinese actresses Zhao Wei and Zhou Dongyu were the centrepieces.
The problem: none of the models was smiling. The aesthetic was dark, moody, and expressionless — styled after 'classic portraiture' but stripped of warmth. Burberry said the campaign was 'inspired by classic portraiture, reimagined in an informal urban environment, juxtaposing the old and the new.'
Chinese social media users on Weibo and WeChat compared the images to horror movie posters, the Addams Family, and Chinese ghost films. One user wrote: 'These people look like actors of horror movies.' Another: 'Unhappy family, unhappy Burberry. No one is looking normal.' The campaign was meant to celebrate family togetherness — the most important value of Chinese New Year — but the imagery conveyed the opposite: coldness, distance, and dread.
Why it happened
- The aesthetic clashed with the occasion: Chinese New Year is about warmth, reunion, and joy — a grey, joyless family portrait reads as a funeral, not a celebration.
- The 'classic portraiture' reference was tone-deaf: Western portraiture values solemnity; Chinese New Year values red, gold, and smiles — Burberry imported the wrong visual language.
- The brand ambassadors could not save it: casting Zhao Wei and Zhou Dongyu signalled commitment to the market, but the concept made them look unhappy in a context where happiness is the point.
- Burberry's silence compounded it: the brand referred to its press release and did not respond substantively — no apology, no explanation, no acknowledgment that the campaign had missed.
The lesson
A Lunar New Year campaign where nobody smiles is not 'reimagining tradition.' It is importing a Western aesthetic into a context where warmth is the only requirement.
Sources
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