Ruthie Rogers stands on the cobbles of a London mews in a long cream trench, the belt knotted and the buckle left to hang, with blue shirt cuffs at the wrists and red tights running down into brown heeled clogs. The River Café chef is one of 170 people Jack Day photographed in London, New York, Seoul and Shanghai for “170: The Anniversary Portraits,” released by Burberry on 28 September. FashionUnited published the images with the sitters named in the captions. A catalogue can now be generated with nobody in it, so a real person in front of the camera works as proof. Burberry has put the headcount in the title.

Burberry’s cast grew more than sevenfold in seven months. The March campaign opened the anniversary push with 23 stars shot by Tim Walker in black and white, and the September cast adds street-cast locals and long-standing employees to the friends of the house, WWD reports. The week before, J.Crew marked 40 years of its Barn Jacket with 160 people in five American cities, and its chief marketing officer, Julia Collier, led with scale: “The scale of this campaign is extraordinary, but its power comes from the individuality within it” (FashionUnited). Highsnobiety filed both, with Zara’s 50-model 50th from last year, under “More is More.” Zoomed out, it warned, the frames “blur into one mass, not unlike my own phone’s hopelessly chaotic camera roll.”

Most sitters are framed head to toe on a pavement, looking into the lens, while the street does the set design: a red standpipe in New York, a signage-lined side street in Seoul, a blue bicycle behind a camel trench in Shanghai. That is the grammar of the street-style blog, and the house has used it before. In November 2009 Christopher Bailey, then creative director, commissioned Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist to photograph trench wearers in the world’s fashion capitals for Art of the Trench, Wallpaper* reported. The plan was for people to “upload their own photos,” and Wallpaper* expected an “ongoing archive devoted to the trench.” Burberry means the new campaign as a tribute to that site, WWD reports.

The tribute keeps Schuman’s pavement. In the published frames, cobalt recurs in three cities: blue cuffs at Rogers’s wrists, blue tights under a burgundy nappa Kensington trench jacket in Seoul, a blue cap in New York. Part of the crowd draws a Burberry salary, among them Dawn Bullingham, who works at the Castleford factory and has been with the company for 46 years, WWD reports.

Berlin supplies the counter-case. At Zalando’s Partner Day, Matthias Haase, its vice president for content solutions, gestured at a room-sized video panel and said, “Around 70 percent of what you see behind me was created with AI,” WWD reported. That covered one panel, not the whole catalogue, but Zalando and About You have almost entirely closed the studios that shot their catalogue pictures. Content with real-life talent, such as the brand ambassador Lily Collins, was among the few exceptions. WWD also reports that the shift did more than cut costs: it raised the platform’s conversion rate.

Scayle Studio, the generator About You now sells to other brands, offers models “of all ages,” poses such as “open laugh” and “confident cool,” and “lifelike backgrounds” on request. Quite a few, WWD noted, “do look like different generations of one very beautiful family with dark eyebrows and big lips.” Neither FashionUnited’s nor WWD’s account of the launches mentions AI, and Burberry says the portraits show how the same garment changes character from one wearer to the next.

Highsnobiety’s test is whether a crowd campaign can “feel lived in.” Burberry passes because it “captured each person outside in the world,” and J.Crew fails for ushering its 160 into “five liminal photo studios.” That grades the backdrop, which a generator now offers as a setting. No setting supplies what Highsnobiety itself spotted among the 170: a dentist, a herbal pharmacist, a London cybersecurity expert named Dev Dhanjal. The camera-roll jumble is what 170 unrelated faces look like.

A render can wear a raglan-shouldered Waterloo trench, but it cannot have spent 46 years with the company that makes one.

Burberry already sells its Heritage trenches on provenance, made at Castleford from cotton gabardine woven at its own mill in Keighley. The anniversary portraits extend that label from the coat to the advert: a named sitter in a named city, photographed rather than generated. Customers get a photo booth in the Harrods pop-up, which opens Friday and runs until 28 October.