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'The structure comes from within,' said an energised Neil Barrett backstage, referring to his triumphant A/W menswear collection, where the sport-tinged clothes might very well have stood up on their own in a corner without any body to buttress them. If that sounds awfully stiff and rigid, it wasn't. This season Barrett was clever enough to work an array of high-tech bonded fabrics - from wool to rayon - that had the gleaming, weighty surface of polished marble. The lynch pin silhouette of the collection was the sweatshirt - a Barrett staple that has risen in his product arsenal to cult-like high fashion status over the last few seasons. After initially striking gold with this basic beauty, Barrett has continued to evolve the garment, morphing it from just a casual nobody to a formal, centre stage piece, and adding on inventive intarsia designs that sizzle with black leather, or crackle with a thunderbolt. Bolstered by slim, cropped sleek sweatpants, and sharply drawn jackets and belted coats, this collection gelled in a coolly cohesive way. An added bonus was the degrade colourations that dripped over mohair, wool, or cashmere jackets and pants, a technical conceit that hit its crescendo in a jacket that blurred from tobacco leather to suede on a single garment.
