Barbour has been busy reinventing itself over the last decade, leaning harder into collaborations than at any point in its century-long run.
The brand’s partnerships with other style brands, both old and new, including Levi’s, Baracuta and Noah, have given classic jackets like the Bedale a clever second life, sometimes by sharpening the silhouette, sometimes by swapping in new materials, sometimes by just letting two heritage labels jam together and see what happens.
Those riffs have generally landed with us. One long-running partnership, however — Barbour’s ongoing link-up with the Danish fashion house Ganni — has never quite clicked, even before you factor in that Ganni is a women’s brand.
After all, as our own Brad Lanphear has pointed out, some of the best jackets Barbour makes are exclusively on the women’s side of its catalog, and we’re on the record for wishing they’d migrate over to menswear too.
And though this fourth round of collaboration with Gianni, as usual, includes more than a few intriguing ideas – including a two-in-one design that allows at least one jacket to switch between long and short lengths – these ideas are all overshadowed by an almost cartoonish new detail that unifies the collection’s entire jacket lineup.
Collar cacophony
The easiest way we can think of to describe the vibe of this latest collab is maximalist chaos, dialed all the way up through a single design detail Barbour helped turn into a menswear staple: the corduroy collar.
Barbour didn’t invent it, but few companies have done more to canonize that contrast collar as a tiny but transformative flourish — the kind that signals tradition, texture and a quiet sense of quality.
The new Barbour x GANNI pieces take that idea and run a marathon with it, blowing the collar up to surreal, almost theatrical proportions.
