There are only a handful of living fashion designers whose names have become synonymous with a singular aesthetic. The way a coat looks when it’s wrapped around the body, say, or the visual contrast created by two patterned fabrics being draped together. There’s Ralph Lauren, of course, whose acute understanding of the American pastoral look is second to none. And then there’s the master of oversized tailoring, Giorgio Armani. Miuccia Prada is up there too, as is spider king Hedi Slimane. And then, naturally, there’s Sir Paul Smith. Beloved for both his exuberant approach to life – the 74-year-old, who has been with his wife, Pauline, since 1967, still goes swimming at 5am every day – and his playful design perspective, Smith has spent the best part of his life peddling his unique vision across the globe.
And it’s a vision that has become as closely associated with brightly coloured tailoring as the “classic with a twist” casual pieces (think muted macs lined with colourful stripes and bomber jackets cut from sherbet silks) that line the rails of his 166 worldwide stores.
So, in this, Smith’s semicentennial year, we thought it would be a good idea to sit down with the nicest man in fashion and ask him to recall the key moments that have come to define his extraordinary career, decade by decade. Covering everything from his first Parisian show to breaking ground on the world’s most Instagrammable store (not to mention, of course, all the times he dressed the late, great David Bowie), here, in his own words, Smith recalls a fashion life very well lived...
Paul Smith mounts his first ever menswear show in Paris in 1976. The City Of Lights is agog. We started making clothes to sell to other people in the winter of 1976. Back then I showed my collections in tiny little hotel rooms in Paris because there were no fashion weeks in London, Milan or New York. It was just Paris. I had a couple of mates from the RCA [Royal College Of Art] who were working in design companies in the city and they had a beautiful apartment on Rue de Vaugirard. We were having dinner one night and they said, “Why don’t you put on a fashion show in our apartment?” and I said, “That would be fantastic.” It was on the first floor, with lovely big windows and parquet floors. I think it was probably the only fashion show ever that all the guests had to knock on the door to get into – there was just a little Paul Smith business card above the doorbell.
When we were pulling the show together, it was all hands on deck. The music was done on my cassette player at home and we played a continuous tape. We paid for a few models, but they were very reasonably priced. Pauline and I literally sewed every trouser and did all the fittings. It was just lovely. It was one of those shows that if you did it today it would feel so unique and special. There were only about 35 people in the audience and it was just honest and friendly.
I’d been working as a freelancer at a few companies and I’d done a bit of styling. I was mates with the guys at Arena magazine and the Face and I worked for Browns on South Molton Street as a freelance designer a few days a week. Through all those connections I got to know the people at Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman in New York and Seibu in Japan. Miraculously, most of them came to the show. Now, the fashion week schedule is so enormous that you probably wouldn’t get them as a young brand, but back then there were only about 30 shows and I was the new kid on the block. In terms of coverage, at that particular show I think we only had someone from Daily News Record – though I’m not sure if that exists any more – and Women’s Wear Daily maybe. I did two shows at that apartment, but the neighbours complained so we couldn’t continue.
About a year later I did my third or fourth show in Paris, in a very minimal, raw concrete gallery which was owned by the interior designer Andrée Putman. For that show we used all black models, the soundtrack was dub music, the clothes were colourful. It was a radical change. I remember talking to Gene Pressman, [former] co-CEO of Barneys, and he said, “What have you done?” I was really scared, thinking, “I’ve gone too far.” Anyway, it went on to be a better-selling collection than previous ones. It was just a moment where I was ahead of the game. It wasn’t too radical and it resonated with the buyers, but it was a bit of a shock at the time. They were mainly used to British designers showing clothes made from British fabrics and tweeds and suddenly I was doing silk slubs and cottons in raspberry or Yves Klein blue.
I think that show was the birth of the dreaded “classic with a twist” expression that people so often apply to us now. Our clothes were very wearable but they had that little bit of difference.
Smith introduces curios and non-clothing items to be sold in his stores for the first time, from Filofaxes to Dyson vacuum cleaners. The face of shopping for fashion changes forever. On 9 October 1970, I opened my first shop and it was a tiny square with no windows, which only opened on Fridays and Saturdays. You would literally walk in and see nothing but an Afghan hound and me, so it was already crowded before anyone entered. I suppose that was where my “selling more than just clothes” idea really started, because having additional things available to buy – like a poster I nicked from a café in Paris (with permission, of course) or some penknives Pauline and I found in Greece – acted as a bit of an icebreaker. It helped give people coming into the confined space a sense of relaxation.
When I came to London in 1979, I opened my shop on Floral Street and it was the first minimalist shop in the whole of England. Deyan Sudjic from the Design Museum wrote later that there was no other shop like it, which was a wonderful compliment. If you think about Comme Des Garçons and the other Japanese designers – Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto – they didn’t appear until the early 1980s and they obviously had that minimalist design too. Mine was a completely empty concrete space.
Around 1982 I was invited to Japan for the first time and since then I’ve visited something like 100 times. I’ve got many shops over there, under licence. In those early days, Japan was full of gadgets: matte black watches and matte black pens and matte black cigarette lighters and hand-held fax machines and watches that turned into robots. I used to buy all those things, bring them back and sell them in the shop. I had this cabinet that had a sliding glass top on it. From the stuff in that cabinet I used to make as much money as I did from the clothes. Everything in there was just so unique and different.
Later, a friend of mine had this wonderful diary, which turned out to be something called a Filofax. It was loose-leaf but it also had a diary and note paper and little plastic wallets for things at the back. Pauline asked my friend where it came from and it turned out that it was from a little stationery shop that is now a Starbucks on Kingsway, just around the corner from my office. She bought me one and I saw the company that made them was called Norman & Hill. When I eventually went to visit them in Bethnal Green I realised the company literally consisted of a very elderly man and an elderly lady. They supplied the army and people from the church with Filofaxes. It was a new way of being organised.
I managed to persuade Norman & Hill to make the covers of their Filofaxes not just in black, but in browns, greens, navy blues, burgundies and then I asked if I could put together a pack of what I thought was correct for the modern person. You know, things for your credit cards, etc. Many people think we invented the Filofax, because in two or three years we sold 17,000 of them! It was unbelievable. People such as Mickey Drexler, who was running Gap, came and bought 50 of them. It was just one of those bonkers things. Then Neiman Marcus wanted to know if I could wholesale them. Eventually I was offered the opportunity to buy the company, which I didn’t, because I was focusing on clothes, but that was phenomenal.
James Dyson was also a mate of mine – is still a mate of mine, although I’ve not seen him for 20 years. He came out of the RCA and he invented this vacuum cleaner that was in pink and lilac – very unusual colours for a vacuum cleaner – and it had this transparent drum for the rubbish. He was finding it difficult to distribute, so I offered to sell them in the shop. People who came in the shop thought I’d forgotten to put it in the cupboard after cleaning in the morning. I put a cardboard ticket on it with the price – it was quite costly – but, from my memory, we sold quite a lot. The interesting thing is if you link it all up, the 1979 minimalist shop at 44 Floral Street was so ahead of its time that it attracted people such as Norman Foster, Deyan Sudjic, Richard Rogers and lots of people from the creative industries, John Hegarty, etc. It was a shop that really attracted young creative people, so the vacuum cleaner was perfect because it was so modern.
It was also in 1982 that I opened 43 Floral Street, next door to my minimalist one. That shop was originally built in 1890, so it had all these raw brick walls and floorboards and I didn’t have the heart to rip it all out and make it more minimal. I kept it as it was and found all these lovely old shop fittings from tailors in the north of England and that became the Paul Smith look for many years. I thought, “Oh, God, I’m going to lose Deyan Sudjic and Norman Foster because they’ll think I’ve gone a bit twee,” but, in fact, by putting a Dyson vacuum cleaner or a Braun calculator – I was the only person in the whole of England selling Dieter Rams-designed Braun calculators – in a traditional mahogany showcase, the contrast and irreverence was joyful. Luckily I never lost those interesting, modern customers and it carried on from there.
Smith opens his first ever solo exhibition, at London’s Design Museum to international acclaim... and the delight of overexcited schoolchildren everywhere. My first exhibition, True Brit, was mounted at the Design Museum in 1995 and it had more schoolchildren and educational institutions visit than it had ever had before. The reason, I think, was because I approach all the exhibitions and books I do in a sort of non-fashion way. Traditional fashion exhibitions are very much about the clothes, whereas Hello, My Name Is Paul Smith, my second Design Museum exhibition, and True Brit were both based on a kind of “this is how it works” model.
For instance, there was a wonderful conveyor belt I commissioned for the exhibition. It was like a model railway that showed the entire fashion process, from the germination of the idea to making the patterns, to getting samples, to showing the fashion shows. It showed the birth of the idea all the way through to the realisation and the delivery to the shops. That conveyor is in the corridor of my head office in Nottingham today. It’s unique and I think that’s why it attracted so many school kids.
I get so many of them coming here to see me in London saying, “I want to be a fashion designer.” And I ask them how they think that works and they say, “Oh, well, you design clothes, you have a fashion show, you open a shop,” and I say to them, “Well, there are a few other bits in between. Have you got any cash? Have you got anywhere to make the clothes? Have you ever cut a pattern?” The answer is always no. So that exhibition was very practical.
One of the most formative decades in Smith’s fashion life, he is knighted in 2000 and opens his iconic bright pink shop on LA’s Melrose Avenue in 2005, which goes on to become the most Instagrammed boutique in the world (probably). In the year 2000 I’d been living with Pauline for 33 years, since 1967. We never got married, but in 2000 she asked if we could, so we arranged a date. Later on in the year I gave a load of my mail to the team in the office – gas bill, American Express, etc – and one of them said, “You’d better look at this. It’s from the Queen. She wants to make you a knight.” Which was great and lovely and I said yes and all that. Later on, another one of the team said, “We’d better check the date, because you’re going to Japan and there’s a lot going on,” so she rang Buckingham Palace, put the phone down and said, “You’re never going to believe it! You get knighted at 11am and then you get married at 4pm on the same day.” So it was a busy day. Pauline got made a lady in the afternoon, so she was Lady Smith.
I received my CBE from the Queen, but my knighthood was from Prince Charles. He said, “I think we wore your shirts for our engagement photograph,” which was true. When he got engaged to Diana they both wore blue Paul Smith shirts. The photograph was taken by Lord Snowdon.
After my knighthood, I was also given the Légion d’Honneur. That was really special, because I have been loyal to France with my fashion shows since 1976.
Later, when we were looking for a shop in Los Angeles, I found a building on Melrose Avenue, which had a pointed roof and was wooden and wasn’t very nice – but I could actually afford it. I was sitting at the table in my office thinking, “The house numbers on Melrose Avenue go from zero to 20,000 or something. They’re miles long, those streets, so you’ve got to build the Eiffel Tower to get noticed...” In the end, we rebuilt the horrid building with the landlord and turned it into this big pink shoebox and, by chance, it’s become the most Instagrammed building in the whole of California. Forbes did something on what to do in California as a visitor and our shop was above the Hollywood Sign in the list! It was just barmy, absolutely barmy. There are about 300 to 400 people a day – not now, with the virus – who have their photograph taken against the wall. And then for Pride we had [one wall of] the building painted in the Pride colours. People were driving home from work in the evening and it was a pink shop and then they were driving to work in the morning and it was a striped shop.”
The Paul Smith brand’s relationship with celebrity intensifies, culminating in a dinner hosted for John Legend at Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont in 2019 (but London’s still home). We’re very blessed with people such as Gary Oldman, who lives in LA, and Kevin Hart and John Legend, who I hosted a dinner with last year at Chateau Marmont – a lot of the acting and music professionals wear Paul Smith. They just wear our clothes. They go into the store. We dress Harrison Ford too; he loves our bespoke suits. But then we’ve got a lot of the young bands too. We have never courted the celebrity thing at all. As you know, the front rows of many shows are very considered, transactional places in terms of celebrity. For us, it’s more organic – going back to Bowie, whom I dressed, and Led Zeppelin. Even when I was 18 I was making clothes for Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. We’ve always had this lovely association with music and actors. Daniel Day-Lewis wears us.
It’s never been courted. I’m very approachable. I’m a nice, easy personality. There’s no fanfare. People can come in and be treated like human beings, you know? The shop on Melrose almost certainly helps. During the Oscars it’s a go-to place. If you’re a British actor over there, for instance, you can just go into the store for a hug. I call it a hug – it’s not a literal hug. It’s just a dose of Britishness. It’s, “Ah, Paul Smith.” I go to LA once a year. I’ve been going since the 1970s. I’ve been going to New York since the 1970s. I don’t not like it, it’s just somewhere I go. I’m more of a European by nature. [America’s] not somewhere I’ve ever been tempted to live. I’ve got my home in Tuscany, my home in London. I’ve shown my shows in Paris. It’s what you get used to, I guess.
Smith celebrates 50 years in business with a gala dinner and show in Paris this year (the British press goes nuts over the presence of Susan Sarandon) and unveils plans for Paul Smith's Foundation. Thank God we did the 50th anniversary show and dinner in January of this year rather than June because otherwise it wouldn’t have happened. That was completely by chance. So many people have texted and emailed me telling me, “The last time I really enjoyed myself was your show and dinner,” because more or less after that we were straight into the trauma of lockdown. That was lucky timing. In terms of the 50th anniversary show, we have a very nice topsy-turvy archive in Nottingham, from which we remade some of the original Paul Smith prints and ideas. We included some of the photographic prints and some of the floral prints from the 1970s and 1980s in the show. It was a nod to the past. There was a two- or three-minute reportage projection onto the back of the runway, which featured photos from the various shows and ad campaigns we’ve done over the years.
The building where we had the show was a dance hall, with a theatre next to it where we had the dinner. The dinner was just mates really. There were people such as Bill Nighy and Susan Sarandon and others who’ve bought Smithy over the years. No falseness, all people who are already customers. Jimmy Page was there. It was great because it was honest. It was quite emotional, because it wasn’t a manufactured thing where you fly people in from all over the world and they’re not necessarily customers.
It’s a very shallow, fast-moving world now. Not just in fashion but in music and lots of things. At Paul Smith we’ve never been No1, but we’ve always managed to keep fairly relevant. There is a human being called Paul Smith who runs the company – he’s very hands on, he’s still the main shareholder, he still goes to work every day. I love my job and I suppose on my tombstone I’d like it to say, “Great continuity, nice guy.” You know, the thing I’m most proud of is continuity. The fact that there’s always been a relevance. Little shops in Italy and France that are still buying Paul Smith after 25, 30 years. That’s just fabulous.
I swim every morning at 5am or 5.30am. I’m blessed with being with the same lady since I was 21. I own my business. I’ve never really borrowed and even since lockdown I’m still in business and lots of other brands are going to the wall. We’ve been old-fashioned in the way we run the business. We work within our means. We’ve never gone down the logo route, which is a big thing from the past ten years but is a fast buck if you don’t watch it. You can do really well for three years and then the next generation say, “That’s what my sister or brother or dad wore – I don’t want that.” If you’re a bit more anonymous and you have nice clothes that are correctly priced, you’ll succeed.
About ten years ago I gave a tiny amount of shares in my business to start Paul Smith's Foundation. It’s only existed by name until now, but from this September it will have a function. The idea is that it will provide advice for creative people – if you’re a young graphic designer starting out or if you’re a chef, even... You don’t need to be someone going into fashion. I always get people asking me how I would do it if I started today, so initially it’s just going to be an advice source. But who knows? It may turn into a physical thing where you can visit to get inspiration. We could have the archive open and lots of lovely books.
It’s probably partly about legacy and partly about giving something back. Over the years we’ve had so many people come to this building thinking that they want to be a fashion designer and I say to them as we walk around, “It’s lovely to be a fashion designer, but it’s a very oversubscribed job.” When they walk through the building and see display people working – window dressers, marketeers, buyers, social media people – they see that there are lots of lovely jobs that exist in the industry. My approach has always been to demystify the job and make it more understandable and, in a way, more accessible. That’s what the foundation is about.
Sir Paul picks three men who he’s proud to have swathed in Paul Smith
David Bowie
I got to know Bowie in [the early 1980s]. One day I was in my studio above 43 Floral Street. I heard a lot of commotion outside, so I ran down to see if there was a problem. They said, “David Bowie’s in the shop!” At some point he came up to my eclectic, mad-mix studio, which had books and objects everywhere. After that he would occasionally pop in for a cup of tea – he loved a cup of tea. He used to call me “Smithy” and he’d basically come in and hang out for an hour. He was very inquisitive. He’d ask, “Why have you got that book?”, “Can I borrow that book on Henry Moore?” So, you know, then we just kept in touch.
In the November before he died I got a call from him asking if I could do a T-shirt for his last album, ★. So we did a black T-shirt with a black star on it, which was launched on the same day as the record, [two days before] he passed away.
One of my main memories of David was when Pauline and I had dinner with him and Iman and Hanif Kureishi and his wife. When we left, on the stairs going down, David Bowie started singing, “The party’s over. I’m going to call it again,” and Pauline and I were like, “That’s David Bowie singing to us!” It was mind-blowing at the time. He wore Paul Smith in a six- or eight-page shoot for GQ in 1997. There’s a picture of David pointing at me and me looking from behind a white [backdrop].
Sheku Kanneh-Mason
I’ve known Sheku since he was 15. He’s from Nottingham, which is where I’m from. He’s actually played in my shop in Nottingham for about 20 people; one of his early concerts was in my shop. We’ve dressed him more or less since he was 15 – for the Royal Wedding, for the Philharmonia, for the Baftas. He always wears Paul Smith. He’s a mate of the house, really. We know his mum and his dad and his sisters. When we did our women’s tuxedo launch at the Italian embassy in London, his sisters gave a concert. When he was in the BBC Young Musician competition I wrote to his school to wish him luck, as a fellow Nottingham person. He won it and I sent him my congratulations and invited him and his family to come to London to have a look around the showroom and the building. He came with his brother and his dad and it just went from there really.
Gary Oldman
Gary’s a customer. He’s been a customer for years and years. From the pyjamas to the socks and suits, he wears it all. His sons wear Paul Smith. His wife wears Paul Smith. We dressed him for the Baftas and we had a dinner for him at the penthouse of the Chateau Marmont when he won the Oscar for Darkest Hour. It’s a genuine friendship. I was once asked to photograph him for the Sunday Times Magazine. Over the years I used to shoot lots of our campaigns. I’ve done lots over the years. We don’t give Gary a discount. We don’t really do discounts. We don’t give away clothes either. We’re not mean, but once you start you can’t stop. A lot of the designers who give presents, it’s not their own company. The thing about Paul Smith is that it’s Paul Smith’s name on the door. I have to be quite practical.
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