Surveying the landscape of progressive, sports-sourced 21st-century menswear monochrome rules: Olive, navy, and gray play supporting roles, and any other color is probably branding related. The flash of scarlet on a Supreme logo, the fiery orange lick of a Thrasher logo, etc.

Neil Barrett is a rigorous modernist who revels in articulating his finely drafted, wearable sublimations in technologically advanced fabrications—that’s pretty black and white. He’s great, and the clothes are too, but it can feel cold. Tonight, though, Barrett succumbed to a welcomingly warm rush of emotion. A flush of nostalgia. He said: “I really wanted to make it personal.” Barrett looked back, way back, to his 1970s spent in the wildly wet west of England’s Devon—a beautiful county, but quiet. He projected his memories of leafing through NME and being a terrible snob about music—“If it was in the hit parade, I wasn’t interested”—plus the clothes he had and the clothes he wanted. And because this was the U.K. in the 1970s (Barrett was born in 1965), that leads us back to brown—the color of the second Wilson government and power strikes and austerity. Barrett harked back to his earliest, leather heavy collections, too, in an opening section of carefully observed shearling pieces. These were underscored with typically Barrett track pants, brown, in fancy nylon cut short and slim. There were track tops in dense Japanese nylon panelled by modernist shoulder panel extensions. There was color we had never seen before, apparently inspired by his preteen infatuation with soccer shirts. At the end Barrett reverted to type with a bomber and sweatshirt plastered with a digital print of a swooping eagle. But for a while here tonight Barrett was unabashedly British—properly Basil Fawlty—and it was kind of wonderful.