Neil Barrett said before this show that he has never, ever, worn a floral. Neither Liberty ditzy nor Hawaiian hibiscus has once graced the Barrett form. He’s not even been tempted—let alone succumbed to that temptation—to slip a pair of riotously petal-printed boxers beneath his austere Blackbarrett workout gear. This seems a pretty extreme position to take, after all; the flower is perhaps humankind’s most recurring decorative motif. Barrett insisted, however, that he isn’t prejudiced against florals—he just hasn’t yet met a floral he liked enough to wear.
Hence, partly, this collection: “It was about how to make the floral masculine,” he said. It was also an analysis and reconsideration of uniforms, especially sportswear.
But back to the flowers, specifically the anemone. This was Barrett-ized by the removal of color and the accentuation of contrast, printed monochromatically on neoprone bomber jackets and duffel bags or upon a Prince of Wales check. On a knit sweater it was the lower layer beneath a prison-cell grid of sunny yellow lines that matched the rubberized floor of Barrett’s show space, and on trenchcoats, bombers, and shorts the anemone was applied in black-on-black jacquard patches. Oh, yes, it was also realized in volumized abstract illustrations on T-shirts and a raincoat, and printed in red on black backpacks and shorts. Bottom line is that Barrett had overcome his aversion for florals with a blitzkrieg of industrialized blooms.
Beneath these lurked a long ode to the potential of scuba in sportswear, which overlapped into the women’s Resort. Neoprene is an inherently dubious material, pleasing to a certain eye yet unyielding and cloying to wear, but Barrett’s bombers were efficiently attractive enough (less sure about a short-legged dry suit). There were some great, great combat pants with twisted carrot shapes, minimal black suiting with frayed-hem pants for men and women, and a powerful sneaker called the Bolt 01 in two upper designs whose sole featured the Barrett lightning bolt, a motif he recently said he would never wear again—but he seems to have recanted.
If sportswear is the new everywhere-wear—which it is—then Neil Barrett is at the vanguard of those who are refining its codes. And that he’s willing to put a flower on it shows that beneath all that appearance of rigor he’s a flexible soul—on his own terms.
