Neil Barrett: Vacuum the red carpet – the British success story is back

Neil Barrett is one of the most influential British fashion designers working today and yet he's overlooked in Britain. Partly, that's because this expatriate Devonian was poached by Gucci straight out of Central Saint Martins, to be its senior menswear designer. Then, in the mid-1990s, Barrett designed Prada's first menswear collections - marked by their austere, high-notch narrow revere suiting. Twenty years later, the pre-millennial school of minimalist menswear pioneered by designers such as Raf Simons, Helmut Lang and Barrett has become the last word in women's fashion - just look at the tailoring at Céline.

Barrett has a studio in London, but the company he founded after leaving Prada in 1999 (just as the latter bought Helmut Lang) continues to be based in Milan. As we go through the rails of his autumn/winter 2014 womenswear collection last week, Barrett explains: "I just think you go where you can do your work best and express yourself the best. And the knowledge of the fabric mills in Italy is second to none. Because I happened to fall into working for Gucci and Prada, that gave me a grounding of knowledge to open my company easily, and gave me a base of clients, too."
Now, though, Barrett is plotting a return to his roots. "I am looking forward to coming back and showing in London in the next year or so. It would be great to show my women's there."
The British Fashion Council should vacuum its red carpet prontissimo. Barrett's yen for cutting-edge fabrics and painstakingly wrought but easy-to-admire silhouettes would give the London show schedule a new name of real substance.
Next autumn's collection, for instance, features traditional ideas such as the twinset or Fair Isle pattern that touch on Barrett's third-generation roots in a tailoring family. That twinset, though, is turned into a leather cropped sweatshirt underneath a jersey biker. The Fair Isle print morphs into hand-applied polka dots.
The collection is a particularly youthful one thanks to its muse, a Barrett-loving American model named Binx, who if there's any justice in fashion will soon emerge as the next great supermodel. "I met her at a party last September," says Barrett. "I saw her across the room and just thought wow - her attitude was incredible. Then I saw she was wearing Neil Barrett - normally I see the clothes long before the girl - and thought it was a match made in heaven."
Barrett is still a designer, like Paul Smith, whose women's clothes begin with men's. "It's become so normal now for the two to crossover," he says: "I believe in taking garments from the menswear wardrobe but making them essentially feminine." Hence the extended linings and irregular pleatings at the hems of new-season bikers and tuxedo jackets, for the sake of a comely swish at the waistline. Or the classic bouncer's jacket - the orange-lined MA65 - made fitted and sharply delicate. London should be chuffed that this excellent and successful designer is plotting a return to his roots. If only Stella McCartney and Victoria Beckham