Please, make it stop. No sooner had I dug out my Barbour for the wet and windy winter months than I saw another of the brand’s distressing collaborations, this time with fashion designer Sir Paul Smith. Sir Paul, luvvie fashion grandee and founder of the eponymous line that began as a Nottingham-based shirt outfit in the 1970s, has teamed up with Barbour to distil ‘the wit and character’ of both brands.
But I don’t need Sir Paul’s ‘signature stripe trims, colour pops and patchwork’ to be persuaded to wear a Barbour. And I’m pretty sure most people who live in the country would say the same. I like my 12-year-old Bedale Barbour as it is: pretty bashed up, in need of a re-wax, the pockets stuffed with bits of rope, chocolate buttons, dog poo bags and lighters. This is not, and never will be, a fashion item. I wear it because of the pockets, because it is waterproof and, most of all, because it confers a slightly shambolic tone to my look. What a shame that Barbour can’t understand, moi, its faithful base.
This isn’t the first time that Barbour have insisted upon a bizarre tonal shift that leaves its customer base behind. The brand’s long collaboration with Alexa Chung, model and London-based trendsetter, has always been, in my opinion, a huge mistake. In an interview with the Telegraph, Chung sneeringly reveals that the collaboration came about, in large part, because she was wearing her Barbour ironically: ‘I found it ironic to like them because they were the domain of the granny in the country. I thought it was amusing to wear it in London as a young person.’
Ha ha, but plenty of people – including the late Queen – didn’t wear their Beaufort Barbours as a joke: they wore them because they kept you dry on a shoot, or walking the dogs, or feeding the horses. Such contempt for the brand’s DNA is surely a mistake. With Sir Paul, they have presumably chosen someone ancient (he is 79) to confer a certain ‘heritage’ to the project. But is a champagne socialist who once dressed David Bowie really the right choice? I find it hard to believe.
Sooner or later, all fashion brands succumb to the marketing lure of what is known in the industry as the ‘collaboration’. The upsides – when they materialise – are credibility by association, piggybacking off another brand’s customer database and garnering media and celebrity attention that ensures that a British brand like Barbour, founded in 1894, feels part of the zeitgeist. But the downsides are manifold: confusing the brand message, sacrificing long-term loyalty for short-term gains and even bankruptcy.
I like my 12-year-old Bedale Barbour as it is: pretty bashed up, in need of a re-wax, the pockets stuffed with bits of rope, chocolate buttons, dog poo bags and lighters
One need only look at the graveyard of Designers at Debenhams or the questionable Cath Kidston team-up with Care Bears to see that the bods in marketing can (and do) get it seriously wrong. Sadly, this isn’t enough to stop the lure of the collaboration in ever more surreal and cloth-eared ways. Collaborations that have no clear logic for their existence other than the noise of a press release are an insult to the consumer; the Balenciaga and Crocs or Nike and Tiffany collaborations spring to mind.
In the case of ‘Barbour loves Paul Smith’, as it is embarrassingly labelled, there is something particularly tone deaf about the notion of Britishness on offer, a kind of paint-by-numbers idea of our national spirit that could only appeal to someone who knows nothing about Britain.
Witness a Friesian cow on the lining of a jacket, a tartan mash-up umbrella that gives me a headache just looking at it, and an Oasis tribute patchwork bucket hat, all designed to combine Sir Paul’s ‘irreverence’ with the brand’s ‘country credentials’. Nobody – and one presumes least of all the King, who wears a Barbour from time to time – asked for this; it’s not stand-up.
An instructive Reddit thread on the Barbour collaborations that customers would actually like to see came up with some far more logical suggestions. These included a plea for Barbour to collaborate ‘with its extensive history and bring back the trench coat’ and many requests for Barbour to team up with gunmakers such as Holland & Holland or James Purdey, which are deemed more proximate to the Barbour legacy. I don’t know if the marketing brains at Barbour want my tuppenceworth, but here it is anyway: leave the Barbour alone; stop it right there. Their best brand collaboration that has yet to happen? A Nigel Farage collection, of course.
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