Paul Smith on why we need happy clothes
On a hot Sunday in Paris recently, Paul Smith was backstage juggling a rubber fish. The fish was the invitation to his SS18 fashion show starting within the hour and he was anticipating the front row looking daft as they used them to fan themselves under the glass-roofed gym of the Lycée Carnot. “It’ll either be brilliant or I’ll be hiding,” he said.
Sir Paul, 70, is not like other designers. He wears his eccentricity well. Like his famous suits, he comes tailored with a twist and over 47 years he’s made a serious and successful business out of it. He sells his clothes in over 70 countries, with 39 stores worldwide and hundreds of global franchises. Although turnover dipped under £300 million in 2015, lightheartedness is still stitched into the DNA of the brand. “With the mood we’re getting from a lot of countries at the moment, it’s important to be positive,” he said.
In Paris, he was showing next spring’s men’s and women’s collections together for the second time (previously womenswear was shown at London Fashion Week). A lot of experimentation is taking place in fashion houses right now but that blending makes sense for Smith. He believes it’s having a positive effect on his design. “What’s interesting is that previously the women’s had a strong masculine feel to it,” he said. “And it still has that sense with suits and tailoring, but now I’m adding more dresses and feminine pieces so that the two stand out from each other.” This collection called Ocean — hence the rubber fish invite, the surfer sandals and a kitsch tinned fish label motif — emerged, like so many of Smith’s designs, from his love of print, specifically the Aloha shirt. “At the beginning of my career, I used to buy van-loads of vintage Hawaiian shirts from America and sell them to kids from Sheffield and Manchester, so I was thinking about that. We’re quite famous for our print now,” he added, in his typical unassuming style. “We have about 20 in-house designers for print alone. And then we’ve got all the optimistic colour too.”
It made for an infectiously cheery collection, enhanced by a finale that swung along to the sound of The Beatles’ Octopus’s Garden. The vintage prints of those shirts transitioned in degrees — just visible as a flash of sunshine yellow under a streamlined trouser suit in black and blue, onto mid-length shirt dresses and a drawstring skirt, patchworked into a silk dress — “easy peasy, pockets, side zip, no nonsense” and less noticeably as the drawn threadwork pattern on scarlet and black slip dresses. Showerproof outerwear in ripstock performance fabric were smothered in flowers and worn with surfer sandals. “It’s got that masculinity in terms of the fabric but the femininity of the optimistic print. Sportswear is so important now. People are feeling happy wearing tracksuit bottoms and a blazer. That’s where it is at the moment.”
There was a new ease in all of this making Paul Smith womenswear feel right for now. Having often struggled in the shadow of the vastly successful menswear collections, it’s looking confident again.
Smith said that “being number one or too trendy” has put him in good stead. While he’s been knocked by the effect of terrorism in Paris — a 26 per cent decrease in tourist shopping can’t but be a blow when you have five stores in the city — he believes the company is in a strong position to face the changes in retail and the economic uncertainty of Brexit. “As a company, I’m blessed with being independent. I’m still the boss, we own most of our buildings, we’re very odd in that we’ve got no borrowings,” he said. “And we don’t have greedy shareholders asking for more, more, more.”
This year he will open new stores in Manchester, Copenhagen and Berlin. The Manchester one will be “posh because it’s near Céline”, but the other two will be what he’s calling neighbourhood stores. “They’re in cool areas of town, very small. We’ve opened a little one in the Marais here in Paris [there are five Paul Smith shops in Paris] and it’s been incredibly popular because it’s tiny, the staff live in the area, they know a lot of the customers. They have conversations. I like that. It’s an honest way to do business.”
That honesty is something he’s proud of. “Because I started the business myself at some point I’ve done everything — packed the boxes, sold the collection, done the window dressing, driven the van and put on the shows with just me and my wife hemming all the trousers,” he said. “When you’ve had that more rounded experience it helps you know your business and it keeps you down to earth.”
And as the international fashion press began to gather on the benches on the other side of the stage, he handed over his rubber fish and got back to work again.