Barbour Steve McQueen: limited

Nice pieces, fantastically shot, but ultimately only really wearable by those in the US, given the stars and stripes.
Available at End

Barbour: A jacket for life

I remember when I bought a Navy Barbour Beaufort jacket back in the eighties. I couldn't get a green one because my mate had that colour. It was during my casuals football hooligan phase and I used to wear it with a pair of brown jumbo cords and an Aquascutum scarf and I used to think I was some sort of cross between a hardnut and a country squire.

After a while it was replaced by something else, probably by Stone Island, and it was left in the cupboard in the spare room at my Mum and Dad's. Shortly after that it was drafted in to service by my Dad who wore it to work on building sites. I found it a few years later in the cupboard he kept his work stuff in, battered, ripped, faded by brickdust. It looked wonderful.

Why I didn't reclaim it then I will never know because they moved shortly after and because by then my Dad had retired he chucked it out with everything else that he no longer needed. He never really did register the significance of Barbour and the 'jacket for life' ethos.

If I still had that jacket I would have sent it back and had it refurbished, just like the coats in this video.

Hindsight. It's a wonderful thing.

I'll just have to get myself one of the new Wood Wood collab Bedales instead (below).

Via Unabashedly Prep

Barbour x Wood Wood tenth Anniversary jacket

I can't say I have paid much attention to either Barbour or Woodwood. It's all nice solid stuff but there's always been something else. However this collaboration to mark the tenth anniversary of Wood Wood is a bit special, and certainly warrants more than a cursory glance. 

Available here from the end of September.

Tokihito Yoshida for Barbour Spring 2011 To Ki To: bang on

Tokihito Yoshida has to be the best thing to happen to Barbour since the weather. He's been involved with the brand beloved of country squires for a few seasons now, and it's evident from this collection that he's settling in nicely.

He's covered all his bases here - from a swing jacket for the city, through to a waxy number reminiscent of the generic Barbour look for when you're popping a couple of pheasants.

Jeeves! Release the birds!

Via Slamxhype

Barbour nylon International jacket: A rip-off of a rip-off

I suppose if someone rips off your age-old design and then releases a lightweight version in a rainbow of colours, you have every right to do the same yourself.

It's just a shame that it took the success of Visvim's Alta jacket for Barbour to realise there is more to life than stinky wax (even though Visvim themselves released a wax version last year).

This new line of International jackets in lightweight Nylon for summer, owes more than a little to Visvim's Altas of last spring in terms of colouring.

All the same, Visvim's release (below) was crafted from Paclite Goretex. Barbour's is in nylon.

So they've got a bit to learn from those Japanese counterfeiters.

Tokihito Yoshida x Barbour SS 2010 TO KI TO Beacon line

There was a time when a Barbour jacket without wax on it would have been considered unfinished. It would have ended up on the reject pile of the factory.

Now it seems that wax is fast becoming an optional extra since the label shed the mud and stink of the country and started to wake up to the possibilities of urban streetwear.

This has a shed load to do with the newly opened lines of communication with Japan, in particular Tokihito Yoshida, who has given Barbour the sort of direction it was never going to get from a farmer at the edge of a field.

All of a sudden Barbour has become a UK label to be reckoned with. It is regaining its rightful position as quality outerwear.

Before the agricultural types among you bombard me with cowpat scented comments, I'm sure they still do waxed jackets. It's just that they do other stuff now too.

Barbour Autumn / Winter 2010 down parka

Looks like they've been banging their heads together over at Barbour again.

This year saw them veer off that country track with a Japanese colab line, and it looks like they're remaining in previously undiscovered territory for A/W 2010.

They haven't messed around this time. Straight in with a distinctively uncountry looking down filled jacket, which would be more at home on the streets than the grouse moors.

With the weather the way it is, it's a shame they took so long to think of it.

Via slamxhype