Barbour builds a season around its own tartan

A pattern with a season built around it

Barbour's autumn winter 2026 season runs under the name Original and Authentic Tartans, and the pattern is not one element of the collection among others. It is the organising idea. The campaign, a London exhibition during Fashion Week and a student competition run with the British Fashion Council are all built on the same checked cloth.^1,2

The campaign follows Idris Elba and Sienna Miller, cast as two friends, through the Pentland Hills in Scotland. The garments shown run across knitwear, shirts, skirts, coats and quilted outerwear for men and women, and the tartans named on the campaign page are Classic, Shadow Classic, Hazelwood, Dunoon and Lonnen. Shadow Classic is presented as a variant of the Classic Tartan, the countryside palette rendered in a quieter register.¹

Three days at the Saatchi Gallery

From 17 to 19 September 2026 Barbour occupies the Saatchi Gallery at the Duke of York's HQ on the King's Road in London with an exhibition titled Tartan Reimagined: The Barbour Way. The 17th is a press day and the two following days are open to ticket holders, on the Friday from noon until nine and on the Saturday from ten until six.²

What is in the room is a wider inventory than a collection preview. It covers the brand's Scottish origins and its tartan heritage, the craftsmanship behind the autumn winter collection, and the winning entries from Tartan Reimagined, a competition run with the British Fashion Council that asked students to reinterpret the pattern while keeping the original Barbour sett. It also shows pieces from the Re-Loved repair and resale programme, among them collaborations with Gucci, Erdem, Paul Smith, Aardman and Glastonbury with Oxfam, and a working section of the South Shields factory with a re-waxing table and jackets being made in front of visitors.^2,3

The competition brief is the revealing document

The instruction given to the students defines the asset precisely. They may reinterpret the tartan and they may not change the sett, the sequence and proportion of coloured bands from which a tartan is woven.³ The value is placed in the arrangement itself rather than in any product it appears on.

It is also a statement about what a corporate tartan is. Barbour's Classic Tartan is not a clan pattern the company adopted. It was developed in the late twentieth century on the basis of the Ayrshire District tartan, and the Dress Tartan followed later, using the same line widths on a white ground.⁴ The setts are the company's own design work, and it treats them as property rather than as decoration.

The line back to Scotland

Barbour is an English company. J. Barbour and Sons was founded in South Shields in 1894, and the factory that appears in the exhibition is still there.⁵ The Scottish claim rests on the founder's biography: the company dates its tartan story to John Barbour's journey from Dumfries in Scotland to the north east coast of England.¹

That is a slender thread to hang a season on, and the company is not concealing it. The exhibition puts the origin story and the working factory in the same room, so the Scottish reference and the English manufacturing are presented together rather than one standing in for the other. The previous season's tartan campaign had already been shot in Ayrshire, the district whose tartan the Classic pattern derives from, by the photographer Sam Rock.⁴

Why the tartan and not the jacket

Barbour is known for a garment. The waxed cotton jacket is the thing the name retrieves, and it is also the thing every competitor in the category has a version of. A tartan behaves differently as an asset. A specific sett belongs to whoever designed it, and it identifies the brand in a scarf, in a lining and in a photograph of a hillside, across categories that have nothing to do with outerwear.

Running a season on the pattern also changes where it is seen. The lining of a Barbour jacket is visible mainly to the person wearing it. Bringing the tartan out onto knitwear, shirts and skirts moves a private detail to the surface without introducing anything the brand did not already own.

What the three days are for

A gallery in Chelsea during London Fashion Week is not a distribution channel. It is a place to be looked at by press, buyers and the students who entered the competition, and the limited edition pin badges at the door are the only thing on sale in the building.²

The function of the exhibition is to put the pattern's history, its factory, its collaborators and a set of students working on it into one room at the same time. What that establishes for the sett will be visible in how often it appears after the season ends.