The Great Fashion Designers (37 page)

Further reading:
Jane Mulvagh's
Vivienne West-wood: An Unfashionable Life
(1998) and Fred Vermorel's
Fashion and Perversity: A Life of Vivienne Westwood and the Sixties Laid Bare
(1996) tell differing tales. Barbara Baines's
Revivals in Fashion: From the Elizabethan Age to the Present
(1981) provides context and food for thought. Amy De la Haye's
The Cutting Edge: 50 Years of British Fashion
(1996) is excellent background.

Since the 1980s, Paul Smith has been an outstanding force in British fashion, best known for a quirky, humorous design sensibility applied to classic British tailoring. For years he played down his abilities as a designer, but by the early 1990s Smith emerged as the complete package—a designer, retailer and businessman all rolled into one. A pioneering Western designer in Japan, Smith outsold Armani and Chanel there in the late 1980s.

In creative terms, Sir Paul Smith (he was knighted in 2001) has been overlooked, perhaps because of his lack of formal fashion training. His consistent challenge to notions of good taste has made him an important postmodern influence in men's fashion, spilling over into womenswear too (he launched a women's collection in 1994). Smith loves the traditions of Savile Row–style tailoring, but he also loves kitsch and off-the-wall eccentricity. ‘What is good taste? What is bad taste?' he said in 1990. ‘They are both so near. It's just lovely to shove these in a food-mixer and throw them around.' In a later comment, he said: ‘The wrong thing with the wrong thing is the speciality of the house.' American novelist William Gibson, taking as his point of reference a nineteenth-century London clothes market, summed up his style neatly: ‘It is as though he possesses some inner equivalent of the Hounds-ditch Clothes Exchange—not a museum, but a vast, endlessly recombinant jumble sale in which all the artefacts of his nation and culture constantly engage in a mutual exchange of code.'

Gibson highlights Smith's fascination with the found object. Whether in London or Tokyo (undoubtedly his favourite city outside Britain), Smith is perpetually looking out for things that might be reinterpreted in the arena of fashion or simply sold in one of his shops for fun. Countless products, ranging from postage stamps to piles of fruit, are turned into T-shirt photo prints, reflecting a love of photography and the surreal inherited from his father. A childlike imagination is at work: a pair of fake eyeballs, for example, is turned into cufflinks and buttons. In the 1980s, veteran British designer Sir Hardy Amies was one of many who found his shops a treasure trove of ideas and entertainment.

Smith was, and is, a unique figure in British fashion. Although British designers since the 1980s have proved among the most thrillingly imaginative in the world, filling the design studios of major fashion houses in Italy, France and America, they have shown little ability to build and sustain their own businesses. Before Smith, it was left to an American, Ralph Lauren, to translate classic British style for a modern international market. In the menswear market, some British names, such as Sir Hardy Amies, remained traditional in outlook, while others, including Aquascutum, Daks-Simpson, Jaeger and Gieves & Hawkes, made half-hearted efforts to move forward, rarely causing more than a ripple on the international scene. Only Burberry, through the services of a farsighted American chief executive, Rosemarie Bravo, made progress in the late 1990s and the early noughties. Paul Smith might be compared to Vivienne Westwood, another great British designer who has played around with classic style. But where Westwood was an aggressively subversive force, Smith's approach was playful and more accessible. He turned a quirky idea of Britishness into a global language of fashion. ‘My thing has always been about maximising Britishness,' he has said. As he put it himself in an interview in 1981, he produces ‘classics with a twist'—a term that has since been used so often it has become a cliché.

Smith has no time for conceptual fashion, saying ‘I don't like … stupid ideas that can't be worn.' He is also proudly anti–big business, challenging
the corporate style of the modern designer fashion business and the sameness of designer stores the world over. A portrait of the designer by James Lloyd in London's National Portrait Gallery sums up his character well: energetic, irreverent, levelheaded and perhaps a good deal tougher than his easy-going public persona might suggest. Interviewed by Roger Tredre in 1990, Smith was modest about his design skills: ‘A few years ago, I would have said that I was just a getter-togetherer of fashion. But more recently I would say that I am a designer because I do have ideas that start with a blank sheet of paper.'

Paul Brierley Smith was born in Beeston, Nottingham, in 1946. He left school without qualifications at the age of fifteen, whereupon his father, Harold, instructed him to work in a clothing warehouse, where he was little more than a gofer. It was the early 1960s, when fashion was on the verge of a youth-led explosion. Smith began putting together displays in the warehouse and creating his own fashion shoots. His ambition at this point was to become a professional cyclist, but a major accident at the age of seventeen changed all that. Smith spent six months in hospital and emerged with a different outlook on life. He started hanging out with art students in pubs and ingesting the art and fashion of the time. For a few years, he energetically embraced the late 1960s counterculture, dressing the part to the disgust of one elderly man who stopped him in the street to admonish him: ‘I fought in the war for you and you dress like a bloody girl.' He joined forces with a student womenswear designer named Janet, taking charge of the menswear department of her shop in 1966 and learning the rudiments of retail. Smith opened his first shop, Vetement, in 1970, selling such designers as Kenzo and Margaret Howell and initially a few locally made shirts and jackets. The shop evolved at a slow pace, developing steadily, if unspectacularly, throughout the decade. Smith's personal style had shifted towards a more dressed-up look, including bespoke suits, cashmere sweaters and made-to-measure boots with Cuban heels.

The Paul Smith label was not formally launched until 1976 in Paris. New lightweight fabrics were expanding the options for men's tailoring. Giorgio Armani was making softer suits in Italy. Smith took some of these lessons but did not push them nearly as far, preferring to make his impact by playing with suits in different ways. A pinstripe suit was paired with a navy blue spot shirt and white plimsolls. A Prince of Wales check or a chalkstripe might turn up in unconventional colourways, with brightly coloured linings. From the beginning, he had support in his experiments from his lifelong partner Pauline Denyer (they married in 2001), who studied at the Royal College of Art and therefore had a technical training that Smith had never enjoyed. She designed the early collections, he later admitted. In their early twenties, they visited the couture shows in Paris, attending Chanel, Cardin, Balmain and Yves Saint Laurent. Smith's approach to design was more in line with this tradition than the unconstructed shapes that swept through fashion in the early 1980s, inspired by Japanese designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto. ‘At that time, a lot of our art colleges lost the ability to create clothes in a traditional way,' recalled Smith. ‘A lot of exciting things were happening, of course … but I really wish that this foundation had continued. Unconstructed suits hurt my eyes.'

Smith's influence extended far beyond his own label. For many years, he was discreetly working as a menswear consultant for Marks & Spencer, Britain's biggest clothing retailer, ploughing the money he earned back into his own business. Likewise, a thriving wholesale business enabled him to maintain momentum whenever his own shops were quiet. A key move was the freehold purchase and opening of a shop at 44 Floral Street in London's Covent Garden in 1979. It was the first fashion store to open on the street. He bought the unit next door shortly afterwards and resolved to keep its old wooden-panelled fittings, developing the Paul Smith retail style, an eccentric mix of old and new. The shop evolved to become one of the most important stores in modern British fashion history, a place of pilgrimage for modern menswear enthusiasts, not least for its artistic and witty shop windows. Smith's retail experience, learned the hard way, was invaluable as he developed his business. ‘You have to be 90 per cent businessman and 10 per cent designer,' he said.

The 1980s were a golden decade for Smith. While the made-to-measure tailors of Savile Row
struggled to survive, British tailoring was assured of a place on the modern map of fashion thanks to Smith, with a number of smaller designers, such as Richard James, also developing in his wake. The Paul Smith label caught the wave of a newly prosperous Britain. Every go-ahead young creative type in 1980s London had a Paul Smith suit, along with a pair of boxer shorts and a Filofax personal organiser, which were both sold and promoted by Smith. Well ahead of many European designers, Smith spotted the golden potential of Japan, signing a license with C. Itoh in 1984 and travelling back and forth twice a year ever since. This commitment reaped rewards and prompted other designers to follow his lead. Regular
tenjikai
(exhibitions of new collections) are staged in Tokyo, where Smith has a celebrity status of extraordinary dimensions. He was more cautious about the emergence of China as an important new market in the early years of the twenty-first century, opening a first store in Shanghai in 2004.

Elsewhere, the retail development of Paul Smith continued apace, with a first store opened in New York on Fifth Avenue in 1987, a store in Paris in 1993, and a new London shop on Sloane Avenue in 1997. Perhaps his most unusual shop was West-bourne House, a large Victorian residence in Notting Hill, redesigned by Sophie Hicks. In six rooms over three floors, the complete Paul Smith collection was sold, together with a bespoke tailoring service. Smith's womenswear, launched in 1994 and produced in Italy, has had a lesser impact than his menswear, drawing on his menswear collection for much of its inspiration and look. Smith has often stood aside from the mainstream of the designer industry in Britain, avoiding the British Fashion Awards, which he once criticised as ‘self-congratulatory'. He became frustrated with the failure of British industry to produce the management to nurture new designers although he worked hard behind the scenes in an advisory capacity to try and drum up some momentum. The designer also spoke out regularly against the uniformity of modern fashion designers. In speeches around the world, he argued the case for a new spirit of individuality in fashion—a viewpoint that had became widely accepted by the late noughties. A great shop, he said, should be like an Aladdin's cave ‘where you'll see something hideous next to something wonderful, something low-priced next to something high-priced.'

Smith also ardently believes everyone can have a go at design. In that sense, he may point the way forward for the future of design, with a do-it-yourself mood sweeping through modern popular culture, supported by new technological advances. Perhaps the twenty-first century will see the end of the concept of an omnipotent designer, replaced by a more collaborative process in which the end consumer has a significant say. As an outspoken individualist, Smith also represents a note of hope for fashion during a period of globalisation. Now in his sixties, Smith continues to work at a ferocious pace. His design philosophy is best summed up in the title of a book he authored in 2001:
You Can Find Inspiration in Everything (and If You Can't, Look Again
). Smith himself is reluctant to over-philosophise about his contribution to fashion. ‘I ended up designing clothes that I wanted to wear myself and felt good in,' he said. ‘Well made, good quality, simple cut, interesting fabrics, easy-to-wear. No-bullshit clothing.'

Further reading:
Paul Smith effectively explored his approach to design in
You Can Find Inspiration in Everything (and If You Can't, Look Again
) (2001).