Lisa ARMSTRONG
Sir Paul Smith has seen off a few disasters in his time. Now 74, he opened his first store in Nottingham in 1970 and during the following decade managed to expand his business during the three-day week, the miners’ strikes, the IRA bombings and at least two recessions. At one point he had to borrow a generator from a farmer because his boutique only had electricity half the week.
However, “nothing’s as bad as this,” he says cheerily. I’m assuming that rather than being an indicator of genuine delight, the cheeriness is his default setting. He is famously nice and those hyper-mobile eyebrows that always make him look like a mischievous handful is probably his resting face. “This is global,” he continues, gliding across the showroom in his Covent Garden HQ where he’s showing me, via Facetime, around his new spring ’21 collection.
For 16 weeks, from March 23, he drove his Mini into Covent Garden where he worked alone in the 30,000 sq ft building. He has 4,200 employees worldwide and was determined to keep on as many as possible, while trying to get his design brain around next year and his business head around the financial and safety legislation being put in place in all the territories where Paul
Smith operates.
“So far we’ve only had voluntary redundancies. I think Rishi Sunak has been excellent, but the problem is that some of our interiors and architectural designers could technically work from home so they didn’t qualify for furlough, but there were no jobs coming in to pay them.”
He has money set aside but anticipates his business will look very different in a year’s time. “Luckily, our 50th had already made us take a long hard look at the way we do things. Things will be a lot leaner and everyone will be much savvier about expenditure. We’ve already reduced our production by 20 per cent. We’re looking at stores with short leases left and asking whether we still need them.
“Do we need big catwalk shows? My first ever show was in someone’s flat in the Rue de Vaugirard in Paris. Maybe we’ll go back to that. The industry had got bloated and ridiculous – too many clothes being produced and being c constantly discounted.” E Everyone agrees this must change, I say. “Yes, but how many will be brave enough to t do it?”
Paul Smith i is sold in 73 c countries. “And business, no m matter what anyone might t tell you, is catastrophically s slow.” It’s also volatile. In Japan it’s down 10 p per cent, but the average decline around the world is 70-80 per cent. His store on Albermarle S Street, part of L London’s golden retail triangle, currently “enjoys” around 13 per cent of its pre-lockdown footfall.
Things were “fractionally picking up,” he says, “and then Boris told everyone to work from home again.” In Los Angeles, his store had to contend not just with lockdown, but fires, riots and curfews. While some of its neighbours were burned down or looted, the famous pink building it’s housed in escaped relatively lightly, with some graffiti.
“But business is bad. Our Nottingham store is currently taking more than the LA one. Even in Shanghai and Beijing, which so many luxury brands seem to be relying on to pull them out of this, things are only OK. It doesn’t get any better for the big players. If anything, the problems are bigger. Big celebrity designer salaries, higher bills.”
He’s right of course. On Madison Avenue in Manhattan, pre-2020, it wasn’t uncommon for names such as Armani and Dolce & Gabbana to pay $24 million plus a year in rent for a single store. It seems so long ago since that dinner he hosted back in January in Paris, to kick off the celebrations of his company’s 50th birthday. There was a lot to celebrate. Paul Smith is that rare artefact – an independently owned British fashion label with international appeal. The diverse guests – Sir Ian Mckellen, Stanley Tucci, Susan Sarandon, Anna Wintour and Bill Nighy representing the establishment and Jonah Hauer-king and Naomi Ackie leading the charge of the new – nicely demonstrated the breadth of his appeal.
He had managed to keep tailoring – the DNA of his brand – current, thanks to a slew of innovations such as creaseproof fabrics. His so-called Suits That Travel, really do, and when that pursuit returns, they’ll be a good investment. His Tuxedo collection, launched a year ago, which combines modern comfort with the louche elegance of the classic tailoring he so admired when he and his wife Pauline used to sneak into Yves Saint Laurent’s shows in Paris in the late Sixties, have been a runaway success, particularly with women. “I think Metoo made them perfect for the red carpet,” he says. Meanwhile, devilishly clever technical finishes mean a blazer can be showerproof and breathable, with almost no construction in the front.
“Look,” he exclaims, pulling off his own windowpane navy check jacket and scrumpling it up like a tissue, “tailoring is the heart of what we do, but it’s very different from how we used to do it. Now people might wear a tailored overshirt, or a cropped jacket with a zip, wider, more comfortable trousers… or this jacket we’ve done with side zips so that when you’re on a plane, instead of losing your phone down the side of your seat, you put everything in the pockets.” It’s not long ago that he was selling 90,000 suits a year. This year he’ll probably sell 15,000 Suits That Travel. The rest will be athleisure and trainers, which they’ve done for years, and jackets.
“I don’t want to knock athleisure because we design some excellent versions. But jogging pants are not my calling card – they’re almost t too identifiable with the v virus. Whereas tailoring,” he continues, “will always be rock and roll. And w when this is all fi finally over, I think w we’ll all want to m make an effort.” He doesn’t sound ready to throw in the towel, despite having more than enough to live h happily ever after. “Never,” he says. “The loyalty to this brand is a beautiful t thing. To be honest I’m relishing the challenge.”