Legendary designer Paul Smith on drugs, David Bowie and earning his stripes

He single-handedly revolutionised the way British men dress — but Paul Smith insists he’d be nothing without his wife. The fashion legend talks to Paul Flynn. Portraits by David Bailey
Paul Smith by David Bailey
David Bailey
Paul Flynn10 March 2016

For a brand so synonymous with the pleasing idiosyncrasies of British style, it feels odd to learn the gossipy detail that Tom Cruise buys his underwear from Paul Smith. ‘Oh, yes, absolutely,’ laughs Smith, sitting in an antechamber of his Covent Garden office that his staff call the ‘Quiet Room’.

Smith, a slim 69-year-old, is perched on an armchair upholstered in vivid green striped fabric, wearing one of his own navy suits and an open-necked, pale grey pinstripe shirt. We’re surrounded by memorabilia, including a Nativity scene made from peanut shells, old books, magazines and toys.

Surely you’d expect Cruise to buy Calvin Klein?

‘But he doesn’t!’ blusters Smith. ‘Gary Oldman, who was just over here for the BRITs, he was wearing Smithy for them.’

Smith has an amiably lyrical conver-sational meter, punctuated by flattened vowels and laughs. His conviviality makes most of his career sound like a string of happy accidents. Most of his savvier decisions he attributes to his wife Pauline, 75, an alumnus of the Royal College of Art, where she specialised in couture. ‘She taught me how to be a designer,’ he says unequivocally.

Paul Smith shot by David Bailey (Image: David Bailey)
David Bailey

The couple — both wearing Paul Smith —married in 2000, quite by accident on the same day as he received his knighthood. ‘Knighted at 11 o’clock, married at 4 o’clock,’ he chuckles. It was Pauline’s idea to marry; given they’d lived together in Notting Hill since 1967, there seemed no reason not to. ‘It’s my missus, more than anybody, who keeps me going. Really, without her, I think I would have just been a shop assistant in Nottingham.’

He opened his first London store in 1979, on Floral Street in Covent Garden, when he was 33. The son of a Nottingham draper, he’d left school at 15 to pursue his dream of becoming a professional cyclist, going into fashion after an injury when he was 17 left him unable to race. He was hospitalised for six months, and while he was convalescing he made friends with students from the local art college, who introduced him to the world of fashion. He signed up for night classes and the rest, as they say...

The Floral Street shop was a precursor to the 1980s golden age of Covent Garden clothes. ‘I used to stand outside on a Saturday saying, “Is there anybody out there?” as tumbleweed blew down the street.’ These were the days before disquieting human statues, Build-a-Bear workshops and Balthazar. ‘You know Eric Clapton lived round here for a while? And Picasso had a studio on Floral Street for a month.’

Paul Smith walks the runway at his show during London Fashion Week (Image: Getty)
Getty

The tumbleweed years didn’t last long. Katharine Hamnett, Jones Bootmaker and Lynne Franks PR opened in the area. The opening of influential menswear monolith Duffer of St George in 1993 would cement Covent Garden as the bridge between the King’s Road and Shoreditch as London’s menswear hub. ‘The shop got known and it was always ordinary guys who had heard about me — that I’d got a missus, that I was a fairly normal bloke, I liked cycling. They’d come in and put on a suit, but it would have a colourful lining. Or the Prince of Wales check would be in lemon instead of burgundy. All of it was just this little nudge and they thought, “Yeah, I could wear that.” ’

This is Smith’s great legacy — making high fashion amenable to the common man, injecting colour and pattern and verve into their monochrome wardrobe. He introduced suiting to those who didn’t wear suits and pleasing, streamlined casualwear to stuffier dressers. ‘The sheer volume of famous people who’ve subsequently told me that, 25 years ago, they got married in one of my suits,’ he laughs. Then there are the ‘my first suit…’ stories. ‘My mate, who’s a writer, told me about his 18-year-old son who came into the shop to get a suit. He tried it on and as he came out of the changing room a guy came out of another changing room, looked at him and said, “You look great.” It was David Bowie. His son just went pure white, drained of colour.’

Bowie’s death has clearly affected Smith. ‘He was somebody that I knew quite well. He’d asked me to do the T-shirts to go with Blackstar, which was launched on 8 January. I got a call in November, asking if I could do a T-shirt of a black star to be launched a minute after midnight on the 8th, which we did. Sadly, on the 10th he died. It was a day I was doing London Collections Men, so I was on show and trying to be brave and strong but like many people was incredibly sad.’

Smith’s association with music has lasted throughout his career. He was making trousers for Jimmy Page at 18. ‘He had a 24in waist, you know? There were rumours that, by the 1990s, some of the Floral Street staff were selling quality ‘e’s to Saturday afternoon ravers. ‘Oh, almost certainly,’ he says, laughing. His high-street imitators are legion and can feel a little like the menswear Danny Dyers to his Michael Caine. ‘I find them really disappointing,’ he says, attempting a modicum of professional diplomacy.

Smith was an early advocate of the commercial potential of British fashion. During the 1980s he was hounded off Yorkshire TV by a trade union rep and mill owner for suggesting the problem with mill closures was not cheap imports but the unwillingness of our factories to produce design-led clothing. In the 1980s, he wangled a visit to Downing Street, with the intention of making the Thatcher administration take design and its commercial possibilities seriously. ‘Somehow I managed to get myself to Downing Street, to Thatcher.’ Was she receptive? ‘She was but she put me on to Heseltine, who was very flippant about it all. But I just kept bashing away. With Blair. With Major. And now with Cameron.’

Smith's great legacy is making high fashion amenable to the common man (Image: Getty)
Getty

How times change. Now Samantha Cameron is a trusted customer of Smith’s womenswear. (Smith claims not to hold any ideological allegiance: ‘I’m nothing because I can always see both sides.’) Included among the many visitors he has received in The Quiet Room are Grayson Perry, Colin Firth, Gary Oldman and Apple designer Jonathan Ive.

Smith branched out into womenswear in 1993, after Grace Coddington shot the same men’s shirt on female models in US Vogue for six consecutive issues. ‘Bruce Weber, Patrick Demarchelier, all those famous photographers and stylists were borrowing loads of Paul Smith for men and putting them on Linda Evangelista and all those fantastic girls.’ He had to fight to get his womenswear right: ‘There was a period where I felt a bit overwhelmed by it all because I don’t have a strong feminine side.’ Again, Pauline was his saviour. ‘All the clothes she wore when we first met were made by her and they were really beautiful. The way the collars rolled and the stitching, the way the sleeves were put in and the proportions and the pockets. That’s definitely reflected in the latest collection (A/W 2016, just shown at London Fashion Week) which I honestly think is the best collection we’ve ever done. It’s very much based on Pauline.’

He now has ten shops in London and hundreds across the world. The Los Angeles branch, an employee recently told him, has been declared the most Instagramable spot in the city. Its bold pink façade was inspired by a trip to Mexico City to see one of Smith’s favourite architects, Luis Barragán. ‘It’s become almost a problem.’ Tourists favouring a bubblegum-pink selfie backdrop do not necessarily translate into customers. His next London retail spot, opening this month at the new Dover Street Market, will recreate his first shop in Nottingham all those years ago.

London Collections Men opening event

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He worries for London’s future creative generations: ‘London has changed a lot in terms of the rent structure, which is a killer of creativity. The sad thing is that eventually property moguls investing in the London market will realise that at some point you have to stop because you will have empty shops. After the 2008 crash lots of foreign companies bought property; even in Notting Hill the amount of people [living] in the street has declined because a lot of the properties are owned but nobody lives in them. There’s a lot of wealth for people who shouldn’t have wealth.’

For now his energy levels show little sign of flagging — he starts each day with a 5.15am swim at the Royal Automobile Club on Pall Mall and works into the early hours, corresponding with the Paul Smith offices in Japan and Australia. He recently streamlined his mens and womens-wear lines from seven to two offerings, Paul Smith and PS by Paul Smith, with collections coming into the shops four times a year. ‘It’s all a bit weird at the moment — in a good way. I’ve been [designing] for 40 years and sometimes you need to take a breath and readjust. The world is so oversupplied; not just fashion, everything. There’s too much stuff out there and for us it’s how you have relevance in an overcrowded world.’ He sees 2016 as a regrouping year: ‘We’re all running so fast,’ he says.

Although he inherited two of Pauline’s children from a previous relationship, he regrets that they never had children of their own: ‘It would have been nice but it never worked out.’ He thinks about his legacy often and has plans for a charitable trust. ‘Hopefully the business will continue, with the younger staff here taking it on, but there will also be a very substantial trust that will be about helping young people. That’s in place, without an actual purpose yet. We haven’t quite worked out what it will be yet. It won’t necessarily be about fashion, it might be about travel, opening doors, opportunities for young people.’

Whatever it turns out to be, he says that he and his wife have a fail-safe mechanism for litmus-testing what they are doing. ‘We always say, “Does it come from the heart?” ’ he says. ‘It was never about money, any of it. So we can always say that. It came from the heart.’

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