Religion and Robbie Williams aside, nothing appreciates a decent, sustained
resurrection more than fashion. The difference is that fashion, buoyed up by
the Gospel According to Burberry, places a touching faith in the ability of
man — and woman, obviously — to bring about a resurrection after long and
thoughtful market research and possibly the hiring of a big name designer.
In religion, resurrections just kind of happen in a way that your average
McKinsey consultant would find alarmingly slapdash. No one sat around
thinking that what Lazarus needed was to come back with better hair and a
sturdier constitution. But in the 21st century everything has to be planned
and budgeted for to the nth degree.
That’s why what’s happening with Barbour gives me a little fillip of
excitement. What is happening, by the way, is that for the past three or
four years, its wildly practical but, not exactly sexy, blingy or, let’s be
honest, aesthetically lovely, waxed coats — the kind you can imagine William
Hague, or for that matter General Haig, and sundry little
William-and-Katettes scampering across grouse moors in — have become
increasingly fashionable. And they’ve become fashionable not so much because
of anything Barbour itself has done to relaunch, rebrand or restructure, but
despite it.
I say this lovingly. Barbour is not a foolish, crass brand. It didn’t wake up
one morning, spot someone from Dalston wearing one of its jackets and think,
ooh yes, let’s hire an Italian designer to sex this up with some mink
collars and lilac beading. Instead it has been quietly getting on with
streamlining its silhouettes and ramping up its technical credentials so
that you now find slinky Barbour jackets that weigh even less than Cheryl
Cole and come in colours you might actually want to wear, ie black.
But blow me down if it’s not the old, heavy, dungheap-greeny brown ones that
are all the rage among the groovier sections of the nation. The older and
heavier the better, according to Vogue’s Emma Elwick, who wore a
particularly voluminous exemplar over a sequined vest and hotpants when she
was DJ-ing at Glastonbury.
She has since worn it to five festivals, and this, I think, may provide a clue
to the Barbour’s renewed popularity. For it is no longer a talisman of how
many acres or combine harvesters you have access to but how many festivals
you got trashed at. “It probably started off among young boys, who are also
working flat caps with their skinny jeans and un-named plimsolls. It’s the
Hackney Farmers uniform,” says Elwick, “but girls are getting in on it too,
although the wax means the jackets become a bit smelly to be too mainstream.”
If I’ve read Elwick right on this all you really need to do to perfect this
Hackney Farmers thing, is buy it big and buy it battered. Failing that (and
a friend was desolate last Friday when she discovered they were clean out of
big and battered Barbours at Portobello — she wanted to wear one over her
Vivienne Westwood to create a mini stir at a very grown up birthday party)
buy it new and take a pen-knife to it.
You could also, as a sort of Blue Peter, homage-y gesture, start
collecting those little enamel Barbour badges. As trends go, this is
relatively cheap, immensely hard-wearing and ironically class-crossing. It
can’t fail.
Or rather it can if Barbour, which can’t quite believe its luck, gets carried
away and starts doing too much “product-placement” (aka giving Barbours to
celebrities). As it is we’ve seen them on Alexa Chung and Kelly Osbourne and
hundreds of Geldofs, or just the same old twosome in an endlessly variable
array of hair arrangements — the new styles though, rather than the battered
and beaten ones.
There is also the opening, last week, of a new flagship on the (also
resurrected) Carnaby Street. In principle this is progress as, hitherto,
purchasers of new Barbours had to enter shops with names such as Highland
Fling and do battle with 89 coachloads of Japanese tourists to find one that
was invariably in the wrong size. But what if the new, streamlined store
attracts 189 coachloads?
There is a price to pay for success and it is generally that your beloved
secret fetish — the one thing untouched by the global brand strategists —
starts being stocked in Dover Street Market and plans a diffusion range in M&S.
The former has already happened to Barbour. Time will tell if the latter can
be staved off.
Not long ago I was invited to a brain-storming dinner (no such thing as a free
one in this era) with Barbour. I thought it would be just me and the editor
of Country Life. But the table was brimful of editors from magazines
such as Wallpaper and Dazed & Confused — all united in our
love of the waxed jacket and horrified by a (harmless) question from one of
the gentle folk at Barbour about whether the company should take part in
London Fashion Week. For the Barbour revival is a triumph of street style
over marketing, substance over flash, customisation over mass logos. It
couldn’t be more comforting in a recession — perhaps that’s why it took many
of us at that dinner back to the glory days of what was happening in British
fashion in the early 80s. A little bit ugly, quite whiffy, 100 per cent
British. Let’s hope it doesn’t change.
And now for the male model
This is a warning: the “Hackney Farmer” trend identified here could prove
perilous indeed for Barbour. Firstly, it’s a look predicated on second-hand
jackets — hence no moolah for the company. And secondly, unless you are
a Hackney Farmer, this whole HF concept is not only sick-making, but
potentially alienating. The last thing any right-minded man wants is to be
sartorially aligned with a trend spearheaded by painfully self-conscious,
plimsoll-wearing East London latté artisans.
Do not, though, let Lily Allen and her skinny-jeaned men-folk deter you from
considering this great brand. There is more to Barbour than the waxed
numbers (the Beaufort and the Bedale) beloved of true and counterfeit
countrymen alike. See barbourbymail.co.uk for the full selection; as well as
some entertaining rural rhetoric (one, sadly sold-out, design is deemed
ideal for “moon-flighting in a marsh or stalking pinks”), it is a rich
source of winter-coats. The motorcycling jackets outdo Belstaff (the
International Trials jacketis £219), and this winter Barbour has
commissioned the Japanese designer Tokihito Yoshida to remix some of its old
archive designs. The limited-edition results — a Sam Spadish trench (£379)
and a Mad Maxish driving jacket (£479) — are extremely wantable (if
irritatingly pricey).
Luke Leitch
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