Feb 2015

“I needed to challenge myself, to prove to
myself that I could do it without any help.
I wanted total integrity for my brand”
Neil Barrett sweatshirt
£320, T-shirt £170 and
trousers £350
military) are ones he was introduced to early. He spent
his formative years on the south coast, in Plymouth, and
remembers being fascinated by the military uniforms
that his grandfather would tailor for the servicemen who
passed through the naval city. “He was so meticulous
and precise,” Barrett says of his predecessor. “I’m always
striving to achieve that.”
A self-described “dreamer with a practical brain”,
Barrett studied fashion design at Central Saint Martins,
then followed that with a master’s degree at the Royal
College of Art. “At Central Saint Martins, they let you
do whatever you want, which was amazing,” he says.
“But at the Royal College, suddenly all those crazy ideas
had to be applied to reality. That’s when I became more
rounded. I left feeling fully formed as a designer.” So fully
formed, in fact, that a mere two days after his graduate
show, Barrett was snapped up as Gucci’s senior menswear
designer. “I had to pinch myself,” he remembers. “Four
days later, I was flown out to Florence, picked up at
the airport by a limousine, and put up in an apartment
overlooking the River Arno.”
Despite feeling like he’d been thrown in at the deep
end, the designer thrived at Gucci, and five years after
his appointment had ascended to the heady heights of
directorship. Most designers would have been content
with that career high, but Barrett was already hankering
after a new challenge. “Gucci was a fantastic place to be,
but the style wasn’t reflective of my taste,” he says. “Prada,
on the other hand, was a brand I was passionate about.
Prada was 100 per cent my taste.”
There was a slight problem, though: Prada didn’t
have an existing, or planned, menswear division.
Undeterred, Barrett drafted a letter to the Prada Group’s
formidable CEO, Patrizio Bertelli, asking for an
opportunity to outline his aesthetic vision for the line.
Granted an audience, Barrett pulled an ace from up
his sleeve, presenting Bertelli with a fully realised Prada
menswear collection – centring on lean, clean-lined,
sports-influenced tailoring – with samples that he’d
created from scratch in his spare time. “I don’t believe
in doing things half-heartedly,” Barrett says, by way of
explanation. “In my world, you either do something
well or you don’t do it at all.”
Of course, for an ambitious designer, landing your
dream job at the age of 30 presents a conundrum. “Where
on earth do you go from Prada” Barrett asks. “For me,
Prada is the most wonderful company in the world, the
absolute pinnacle.”
With such an illustrious CV, Barrett found himself in
the enviable – and atypical – position of being offered roles
with other design houses. The logical career progression,
however, was to strike out on his own, and he received
plenty of offers from commercial investors for a solo
venture. Again, though, he decided to decline.
“I needed to challenge myself, to prove to myself that
I could do it without any help,” Barrett explains. “I also
wanted total integrity for my brand, and I couldn’t be sure
how pure those offers were or how respectful they would’ve
been of the business.” The offers have kept coming,
though: the designer says that, in his first year of operation,
someone tried to buy him out entirely, and since then he’s
been approached by investors every six months or so.
It’s easy to see the attraction. Thanks to Barrett’s savvy
business sense, the company turned a profit from the
start. In 2006, he launched womenswear after stores
reported that women were buying up all his smallest sizes.
That same year, his label’s sales hit €50m – a remarkable
achievement given that he eschewed any form of
marketing, PR or advertising for the first 10 years.
Today, Barrett finds himself at a crossroads. The
combination of the recent boom in the menswear market
(its growth is expected to outstrip that of womenswear in
the next five years) and the economic boom in Asia (a key
market for Barrett) means his business is doing better than
ever. And, crucially, he’s been able to balance commercial
success with pushing the label forward creatively. His
SS15 menswear collection is a case in point, incorporating
prints made from distorted images of classical statues.
Next on the agenda are accessories. “I’m about to specialise
in bags and shoes, so that’s a whole new world for me,” he
says. As 95 per cent of the company’s revenues come from
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HARRODS MAGAZINE