“This was an Italian way to represent that genre. It’s the same idea when I design things that are Western inspired.
So for example, the garment we call Ennio is like a Western jacket, a trucker jacket, in Mexico they could say
vaquero jacket, which is quite slim and short, boxy, so you can move very well. But the suede is not so
stiff as an American company would have done, so it’s different. We named it after the composer Ennio Morricone,
because to me, he and his collaborator, the great director Sergio Leone, were the most important people that
contributed to making Westerns the Italian way. We’ve also named garments after Trinity, the character played in
several films by Terence Hill, star of the Django movies, and Bud, for his frequent co-star Bud Spencer.”
CLINT EASTWOOD
“For me, it was natural to name a boot after Clint Eastwood, because again, he was one of the main figures in the
Spaghetti Western genre. I couldn’t avoid naming a model Clint because he’s one of my favorite not only actors, but
also, directors. He’s an important figure in my cultural growth. I remember when I was very young, I used to watch
these classic Clint Eastwood movies on the sofa at night with my family — with my dad, my mom and my brother. For
us, it was a kind of ritual. I remember my father drinking his glass of whiskey, and sometimes he’d put his thumb in
the whiskey to give us a taste. My mother would yell at him, ‘What are you doing?!’ Ha, I remember it well.
“We named after Clint a pair of boots we made, that are in fact not Western. They’re more work boots. They’re the
kind of boots that play into the philosophy that I just explained, because they’re work boots but the shape is not
chunky, it is a bit more sleek and tight to the foot and to the ankle than classic work boots. It would’ve been
redundant to just make a copy of Red Wing boots — Red Wings already exist, why should I make the same shoes? For
sure the influence came from classic American work boots, which are amazing, but I wanted to make something
different — a bit more sleek and stylish, but still very resistant. Because with these boots, I go to hike, I go
into the rivers, in fact I could go to make war wearing them because they’re very strong, very tough, very
resistant. But they look a bit different. They look very Barbanera.”
JACK KEROUAC
“Kerouac isn’t actually one of my favourite writers — respectfully, I don’t consider him a great writer. But you
cannot deny that he wrote one of the most iconic books about the concept of travelling. And for sure, the concept or
the idea of travel, of the trip, of movement, is very important to Barbanera as a brand. So for us it was quite
natural to dedicate a shoe to Kerouac, because his most famous book is On The Road, and our style is highly
influenced by life on the road. We like to be on the road, we like that concept of taking a trip, of travel where
you are not always so comfortable, but it's there that you find yourself. That idea of a challenging but exciting
and eventful journey, it’s more authentic, more true, if you get what I mean. That’s why we dedicated a model to
Kerouac. The book On The Road was very important, it was very iconic at the time it was published and
incredibly influential, it helped change the way people thought about life, spreading the beatnik movement that then
spawned the hippies.”
