The Finer Details

A good collaboration involves a little give and take. For A.P.C. and Barbour, that meant getting into each other’s archives, reconsidering familiar signatures and occasionally stepping outside their comfort zones. We joined the in-house design teams in Paris to see the fruits of that push-and-pull, which meant turning up cuffs, opening pockets and paying considerably more attention to jacket linings than usual. Both brands have an established vocabulary: Barbour’s waxed cotton, tartan and pockets equipped for an active countryside life; A.P.C.’s raw denim and particular talent for making a very good shirt feel like a sufficient fashion proposition. The pleasure here is seeing how thoroughly each has considered the other and what that ultimately means for our wardrobes.

Barbour’s archival Thornproof wax cotton provides the starting point, its denser weave giving the jackets structure and deeper shades of sage and navy. Like A.P.C.’s raw denim, it develops a patina with wear: both brands understand the appeal of clothes that look better once you’ve got on with living in them. The exchange continues in the construction, with trucker-jacket pockets and pleats finding their way onto Barbour’s waxed outerwear. Our favourite, the women’s Spey, brings its fishing heritage into decidedly more everyday territory, while the Sugarlump Bedale adopts roomier A.P.C informed proportions. Its name recalls pockets once used for a horse’s sugar lumps; the ring-pull zip can apparently open a beer. Provisions for everyone!

A.P.C. loosens up too, allowing larger labels on the jeans than its usually discreet disposition might suggest. Elsewhere, the branding takes a little more finding. Barbour’s exclusive tartan appears on waistband belt loops, beneath collars and at cuffs, with stitched A.P.C. lettering worked into the check inside the jackets. “We’ve planned it to be a little bit unexpected,” one in-house designer explained.

Barbour has cannily spent the last several years inviting other designers to interpret its heritage (Roskanda, Erdem and Ganni all successful examples), and speaking to the in-house team made the appeal of their jobs fairly obvious. There is an extraordinary archive to draw on, full of material knowledge and highly specific answers to practical construction challenges, alongside the opportunity to evolve. That requires confidence from both sides: to protect the things that matter and allow others to change. For one designer, the satisfaction lay in “the unexpected details that you might not notice.” Having spent the day noticing them, we’d say the work paid off.