Originally known as Made for Japan, Barbour’s White Label is inspired by Tokyo’s streetwear and the unique sensitivity of Japanese design. The total look collection features the brand’s iconic jackets, along with polos, shorts, shirts and trousers, in a color palette where cream, white, navy and green shine.
To launch the campaign in style, Barbour teamed up with illustrator Fei Wang, also known as Slowboy, to depict the collection’s lifestyle and key looks. Soon available at select Barbour stores.
Mr. Slowboy’s crisp illustrations are becoming more and more familiar amongst menswear enthusiasts thanks to his work for Dunhill, Drakes, Fox Bros., Lock & Co. and The Armoury among others.
After training in illustration in Singapore and London, Mr. Slowboy (Fei Wang) worked in an advertising agency in Beijing. Returning to London two years ago, he began to take on freelance work alongside his role directing larger agency projects, mixing a lifelong love of sketching with a professional’s eye for costume and style.
Mr. Slowboy’s art style, as well his sartorial interests, clearly demonstrate a debt to American and Japanese Ivy, as can be seen from a quick look back at the iconic illustrations of VAN Magazine:
We can see the same interest in texture and silhouette. The exaggerated arm-curve that keeps the hands from blocking the product is also echoed in some of the poses used by Mr. Slowboy. But the VAN pictures are clearly product illustrations, not people: their faces are interchangeable and the mood blandly happy. They appear packed in grids but seemingly oblivious of one another; they are one-dimensional men. By contrast, Mr. Slowboy’s faces and figures are full of character. When he uses real people, we get a sense of their personality, from Liverano’s avuncular charm to George Wang’s energetic cheer.
It is clear that, as a good advertiser must, Mr. Slowboy produces the kind of detailed product shots that a retailer needs, and the soft but crisp lines of his ink outlines certainly help. In some of the Dunhill campaign, too, you can see how his style has been adapted to render the bland, mindless rich-man happiness that big brands like to use for aspirational marketing, but it’s clear from his portfolio that this is a mood imposed on the artist by the client, and not the other way around. (The work for Drakes and The Armoury is, unsurprisingly, less corporate and richer in character.)
In his self-portraits (and in his self-deprecating pseudonym) what comes through is hesitancy, sometimes bordering on shyness. The apple pip eyes always look a little surprised in those big glasses. What separates his self-portraits from the characters he draws for paying clients is the note of vulnerability. In these pictures it is as if the central figure has only just spotted the viewer, and is caught in that moment of absolute possibility and flight that flickers between two strangers before they know how the other will respond.
There is also a broad range of humour in his work, from quiet wit to bright visual humour. His characters are people who are capable of making errors, and of laughing them off. It feels like their happiness is never unearned or forced for the camera. Models for menswear typically have the kind of blank, smouldering expression that is supposed to suggest attractiveness while avoiding risk of conveying actual attraction. They are captured in this way to close down the possibility of any emotional connection between viewer and model; to displace their personality onto the products. Mr. Slowboy’s pictures have none of this anxiety, and so enjoy a far greater tonal range. They are happy but also and pensive, relaxed but also curious. They seem like people who have hopes and regrets.
Mr. Slowboy draws a world in which clothing is part of life rather than an alternative to it. The VAN images seem to have been constructed from a product grid, with each pre-cut face dropped onto a pile of clothes. Laurence Fellows’s famous Apparel Arts figures are celebrated for their sartorial detail and optimistic mood, but they almost all have either a bland stiff upper lip, or a fixed, mechanical smile that suggests the same relentless, dumb happiness of the VAN outlines. (The only Fellows illustration I have seen with any tonal complexity is this one collected by Sven Raphael Schneider, though I would like to be corrected if there are more.) By contrast, these are pictures that seem to begin with a person and a structure of feeling, on which Mr. Slowboy builds up layers of clothes, scenery and location. He can take these kinds of risk, I suspect, because his touch on the paper is so light, his technique precise, and the shading subtle but unfussy. (His is a caligrapher’s hand as well as a visual artist’s.) Above all, there is an uncommon level of social intelligence in this work. His illustrations are witty and complicated, his characters as detailed as their garments.
(Note the subtle nod here to Hergé, another palpable influence on the style and mood of these illustrations)
