While waiting for the imminent interview, I start checking out the clothes. The moment I touch one of the shirts, my attitude completely changes. It feels special. The material of the clothes is fine, heavy cotton. The patchwork, the embroidery, it’s all incredibly well done. I start pulling out some of the shirts and I’m taken aback by the careful architecture around the iconography of the shirts. Malcolm X. Maya Angelou. Rosa Parks. W.E.B du Bois. They have the energy of thrifted iconography shirts, but the respect and care of talismans.
I start looking around. Who could be the designer? Was he even here? I look through more clothes. Denim collaborations with Murder Bravado’s "Who Decides War". Yankees snapbacks in collaboration with Omi. And it all feels like high design wear. The most care possible was put into every single garment, a refreshing and settling feeling.
Eventually, my colleagues from office arrive, and I’m introduced to Steven Barter, the designer of Barriers. He’s a cheery, calm, and bashful man born in Brooklyn, raised in Far Rockaway and Long Island, and grown in the mid-2010s SoHo scene. He devotes the next hour to chatting with me after I gush to him about his clothes. By the end of it, I wish I had been recording, and we decide to meet after he gets back from a trip to LA to work on a drop he’s working on with Converse. When we meet a few weeks later at his mentor’s restaurant “Aunt and Uncles” in Flatbush, Brooklyn, I figure out the root of his hands-off approach to his brand presentation: he wants the clothes to speak for themselves. His main mission is to “give light to the voices that came before [him].”
Make it new. Make it experimental. Make it different. Make it unlike anything else. It seems within the design world this is the memo circulating from top to bottom. It doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, just make it new. But Barriers is Barter’s refusal to force a trend, drawing instead from his own history. “Artists, we try to find inspiration from outside of our culture and outside of our homes,” he says, “but when I started my brand I really stared to double back and think about the stuff in and around my house. The portraits from Africa, they’ve been in my home my whole life and I never paid attention to it, but when I started my brand, I went back and wanted to tap into it.”
Barter grew up not only surrounded by Black history but also with deep roots in Brooklyn and a familial dedication to Black history. “My aunt is the principal of the Al Malik Shabazz School in Brooklyn,” he explains. “We talk a lot these days. Instead of looking outside of your house, you need to dive into your house first before you source information on whatever you’re doing.”