TARTAN TAKEOVER: Barbour is moving into the Saatchi Gallery later this month with an exhibition called “Tartan Reimagined: The Barbour Way,” which will run during London Fashion Week as part of the official calendar.
The show, which runs from Sept. 17 to 19, will examine the brand’s Scottish heritage, craft and evolving approach to tartan across a series of conceptual galleries. It will also showcase the brand’s fall 2026 collection, the winning designs from the Barbour x British Fashion Council Tartan Reimagined competition with the British Fashion Council, and Barbour Re-loved creations.
You May Also Like
Related Articles
There will also be a live, working factory installation, and a deep dive into the design of the Barbour tartan “sett,” which refers to the sequence and arrangement of colored threads woven through crossing points. Barbour creates new iterations of its tartan every season, working different combinations of colors into the mix.
Guests will be able to see the winning designs from students who were asked to “reimagine tartan” in their own style, while staying true to the Barbour sett. The spotlight will then swing onto the circular Re-loved collection and collaborations with names including Gucci, Erdem, Paul Smith and Glastonbury x Oxfam. Barbour staff will be on hand demonstrating how they re-wax the jackets.
In 2020, Barbour launched Wax for Life, an overarching name for all of Barbour’s wax services designed to encourage customers to extend the life of their jackets. The rewaxing and repairs service was first introduced in 1921, making the brand a sustainability pioneer.
Re-loved is a more recent upcycling initiative that allows customers to return their wax jackets in exchange for a voucher. Each jacket is cleaned, repaired and turned into a bespoke jacket with new patches and other details, or something entirely different, like a bag.
The company was founded by John Barbour who was originally from Kirkcudbrightshire, in southwest Scotland. He opened the first store in South Shields, northeast England, in 1894, and today it’s run by the fifth generation of the family and chaired by Dame Margaret Barbour.