'I'm an absolutely dreadful hoarder': Sir Paul Smith's extraordinary art collection

"I sometimes joke that I must have started when I was eight," says Paul Smith, "because I can't have been in business for 50 years." He has, though - the British fashion designer and his then wife-to-be, Pauline Denyer, opened their first shop in Nottingham in 1970, a 32 sq ft space with a serious damp problem, to which they gave the swish name Vêtements Pour Homme.

It's fair to say Smith has done all right since. At 74, his clothes, accessories and homeware sell in almost as many countries. He was made a Royal Designer for Industry in 1991 and knighted in 2000, although, as he tells me, "It's continuity that is the most lovely thing. I mean, in your life and mine, how many musicians, bands, designers have come and gone? I've never been number one, but I've always been, I think, relevant."

Smith is proud, too, that even after 50 years at the helm, he still has "a bloody marvellous day, every day". Even in lockdown? "Even in lockdown. Even when I was here on my own, in a building that normally has 200 people inside it, spending four, five, six hours on the phone trying to keep it all going, I got to thinking how privileged I am to still be here, to be surrounded by my thousands of lovely books and my art on the wall."

Ah yes, the art. You see, opening his shop wasn't the only life-changing decision that Smith made in 1970. On a visit to London that year, he and Denyer, who had recently graduated from the Royal College of Art, used their last £200 to buy a David Hockney print from the Whitechapel Gallery.

"It was a case of pay the gas bill or buy the Hockney," Smith says, with glee. "So guess what we did? And sure enough, they came to switch the gas off the following week. But I still think we made the right choice. It was our first proper bit of art, and we still own it - we still love it."

These days, Smith has almost more art than he knows what to do with. Take his London HQ - a former factory near Covent Garden - which teems with not just pictures but hundreds of objects housed in vitrines. Many of the best pieces line the stairwells between the building's four floors, which, when I visited last year, Smith cantered up and down at least three at a time, gabbling all the while about this or that poster or painting lining our route.

Not all of the art he has acquired is kept here. Each of his shops around the world has a carefully curated "art wall" - displaying anything from a photograph to a visually interesting bus ticket. At the Albemarle Street branch, there are artworks for sale as well - at the time of writing, paintings by the late Nicholas Volley and a set of 19th-century wooden corbels were among the items listed.

The walls of Smith's house in Holland Park, too, are home to many paintings, though here it is Denyer, whom he married in 2000, who gets to choose. She tends, he says, towards figurative paintings by William Coldstream (1908-1987) and his pupils at the Slade School of Fine Art, such as Euan Uglow (1932-2000), who taught Denyer herself, when she attended the Slade as a mature student in the 1990s.

"She's the key to it all," he says, generously. "I guess a lot of her friends were artists and, just in conversation, I was opened up to that world. Going to a museum with her is such a joy, because she can describe the iconography, tell me the history of Bellini or Caravaggio, and that makes me look at paintings in a different way."

Smith, who was born in Nottinghamshire in 1946 and left school at 15, says he also absorbed "a huge amount" from the art students who used to congregate in the pub across the road from the hospital where he spent six months recovering from a bike accident when he was 17 (it shattered his dream of becoming a professional cyclist).

It was these friends, and RCA alumni he met through Denyer, who loaned him works on a sale or return basis for his shops. By 1976, he was supplementing art by Hockney and even Andy Warhol with posters he'd liberated from the windows of various cafés in Paris (he debuted his first menswear collection in the French capital that year).

"I've never bought any art for its value, ever," he says. "I've always bought completely instinctively, based on the fact I like something. The idea of art as a commodity makes me feel sad."

I haven't even mentioned Smith's archive in Nottingham yet, which houses his overflow. It's huge - a hangar, really - and home to old runway collections, furniture, magazines, fabrics, as well as art. "If there's one thing I've learned during lockdown - I've been sorting through things - it's that I'm an absolutely dreadful hoarder," says Smith. "To be honest, it's frightened the pants off me."

Sometimes, a piece of art Smith has seen and loved has filtered into his fashion collections. One of the multicoloured stripes for which he is well known, for instance, is inspired by a particular Frank Auerbach painting, and works by Frank Stella, Roy Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly have inspired other colourways.

He took great delight in a particular pink used by Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock's wife, whose work he saw at the Barbican last year. "She was pretty cool, right? Though I think she would have eaten a little boy like me for breakfast."

I ask which are the works on his office wall - the ones that helped keep him going during lockdown. "I can see, hmm, a pen and ink drawing by Dame Laura Knight. Another by [Cecil] Beaton and one by Yves Saint Laurent." He goes quiet; I can almost hear his eyes zipping back and forth. "Oh, a painting of a potted plant sent to me by a fan - I love that one - and a big piece by James Lloyd [who subsequently won first prize in the BP Portrait Award and now teaches at the Royal Drawing School]. He was the first recipient of my scholarship, and now look at him."

Smith established his scholarship for Slade students in 1994, though it has since transferred to the Royal Academy Schools. He and Denyer like to maintain a connection with their students, and James Lloyd isn't the only one whose work he owns.

Clearly, he thrives on giving back. Next on his agenda is the launch of the Paul Smith Foundation, to which creative people in need of advice, or those starting a business, can apply for guidance. "Hopefully, we can help a bit in those crucial early years," says Smith.

He tells me, too, about something quite extraordinary that he did for Uglow, when the artist was dying in 2000. "I'd got to know him very well over the years, you see, and when he was diagnosed [with cancer], we - me and Pauline - decided to take him on the Piero della Francesca Trail in Italy. Piero was his great hero."

"Well, they'd had these particular frescoes in Arezzo under scaffolding for years, and it had finally come down, but when we arrived the first thing he saw was a sign outside saying only 16 people at a time. He just looked devastated: 'I've got to go in there and share him with all these people,' he said - he was quite grumpy by then - and I just let 16 tickets concertina down out of my fingers. It was very emotional. 'It's all yours, Euan,' I said. 'You're on your own.'"

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