Go for a browse in the Paul Smith shop in Mayfair, London, on any given Saturday and you’ll likely find an older shop assistant, straight-backed in fine tailoring, approaching to help you with a new shirt, or a suit for a special occasion, perhaps a jaunty pair of socks. There aren’t many global fashion brands, Paul Smith points out, perhaps unnecessarily, “where the owner is a Saturday boy”. But working in his shop, one of more than 130 around the world, is probably Smith’s favourite part of the job. “It’s fantastic, you meet so many interesting people,” he says, smiling broadly. Smith’s whole career, he says, has always been about doing things in a different way. He’s the untrained fashion designer who created a global British brand, who put a bright lining or some stripes into classic tailoring, and who has turned down multiple substantial offers to buy his company, in order to remain in control.
Sir Paul Smith has just turned 80 – and he has the enviable energy of someone more than half his age, swimming each day before 6am. He’s about to publish his memoir, Threads: My Life in Style. It’s been a good opportunity to do a stocktake. His has undoubtedly been a lucky life – right place, right time, right people (not least his wife, Pauline, whom he met at the age of 21 and who has been integral to his success) – but it’s also a story of hard work, integrity and modesty. We’ll get to whether those values are still relevant in a harsher, more competitive world, and whether Paul Smith can survive.
Smith is wonderfully warm and likes to chat. We’re sitting at a table in the basement of his Mayfair shop, surrounded by beautiful and expensive mid-century furniture (he has always sold interesting objects alongside his clothes). Every so often, a staff member walks by and he’ll break off to catch up (“You all right? You had a nice time?”). Online shopping is all very well, I tell him, but I love real-life shops too, or at least those with character. Will they survive? “I hope that the 12 and 14-year-olds today will realise that there’s so much falseness out there,” and that they can find joy and surprise in “an individually owned shop, or a conversation you can have [there]”.
Smith didn’t intend to become a designer. Born in 1946, he grew up in Nottingham and wanted to be a racing cyclist until he was hospitalised for eight weeks in a bad accident that ended his dream. “I suppose the nearest link with creativity was my father being an amateur photographer,” he says. Harold Smith worked as a credit draper – people would buy clothing from him in instalments – and Smith got his first job with the same company at the age of 15. Harold also co-founded a local camera club. “I used to go and listen to people talking about something called composition and lighting, and then spent time in the dark room with my father.” Funny, creative, a bit of an inventor, his father seems to have a stronger presence in his book than his mother. Was he more of an influence? “I think so, yes. The photography really taught me to look and see. So I suppose that helped me look at things carefully. And he was a very good communicator.” Harold died at 92, still inventing fun contraptions (“I suppose a lot of that was creativity or lateral thinking”) and keeping a lot of young friends, which Smith does too. His mother, Marjorie, was loving and stable, which did a lot for Smith’s self-assurance. “I suppose the security of having a mum like that was really nice.” Later, he says, explaining his approach: “I think it’s just I’m so at ease with life.”
A 21-year-old Smith was still living at home when he met Pauline, who is six years older than him and already had two children and a dog. “It was instant family,” says Smith. Pauline had trained at the Royal College of Art, had worked in London at a fashion company and was then teaching art in Nottingham. She introduced Smith to art, creativity and interesting people. All of it – this new world, and being a stepfather to two young children – was “real big stuff”, he says.
In 1970, Smith was working at a Nottingham boutique. After he took some courses in clothes construction, Pauline encouraged him to open his own “shop” – a tiny back room of a building on a little lane in the city centre – which he called, with hilarious fanciness, Paul Smith Vêtements Pour Homme. “I know, that was a bit pretentious,” he says, laughing. From there, Smith gradually built a business with more than 1,200 employees, about 130 shops around the world (the brand is huge in Japan) and, at its peak, a turnover north of £200m a year.
The 70s were an exciting time to be building a fashion brand. After opening a shop in New York, Smith and friends would go to Studio 54, pushing glamorous Pauline to the front and following in her slipstream. Smith remembers seeing Liza Minnelli there, among others. “[There was] Andy Warhol, there was Karl Lagerfeld, Issey Miyake, Woody Allen,” he says. “We became nocturnal for a week. At the same time there were great art galleries, and openings – [art dealer] Leo Castelli, and people like [Robert] Rauschenberg, and artists that were hot kids on the block.”
It was special, he says, “because it was a time of blank paper, being able to try things out. There was nobody to say you couldn’t do it. I think the problem we all have now is that everything’s so homogenised, everything’s so available. We’re overburdened with information, with opinions, with everything.” Back then, he says, even the smallest things could feel like a huge discovery – the rag rugs he found on a Greek holiday and brought back for the shop, a penknife from an obscure fishing store. Smith discovered the Filofax, the essential 80s yuppie organiser, made by an old east London military supplies company; he popularised it by stocking it in his shop.
In the 90s, Paul Smith the brand hit its fashionable peak, worn by royalty, film stars, rock stars and anyone who’d saved up a bit of money for a wedding or to look good on a Saturday night. Smith became friends with many icons, including David Bowie, Jack Nicholson and Paul McCartney. Did he ever feel out of his depth or intimidated by them? “I suppose [it’s] lack of education,” he says. “I’m hopeless at reading, I’m dyslexic, I’m lousy at history.” He left school at 15, but then, he adds, many rock stars left school around then too. And with rock stars and royalty, “you should never assume that they don’t feel the same. My company motto is ‘never assume’, and that’s helped me enormously over the years.”
The company has struggled in recent times. “We’re definitely not as relevant as we used to be,” says Smith. But longevity “is very much about hard work, continuity, reassessing, never thinking you’ve ‘made it’ because nobody cares how good you used to be”. The world may have changed, but there is still a market for beautiful clothes, says Smith. “If you were here last Saturday, [we sold] at least 10 suits for weddings, for instance. It’s my job to understand the world and how it’s changing, and the wishes and demands of the public.”
Smith is surrounded by young people in the company, he says, which helps to keep him in touch. “Yes, a lot of our customers are older, but 20-odd% are not, they’re quite young, which is really exciting.” But what he has noticed, when he looks at younger people, is less individuality. “They’re not as … brave is the wrong word, but the creativity in terms of dressing is not as it used to be. I think there’s a lot of nervousness about standing out and peer pressure, and what you think you should look like. Whereas we just did whatever was part of our personality.” I think he’s getting at the idea that a slight eccentric and unique Britishness has been lost in globalisation. Remembering his own youth, “I had very long hair, I had velvet trousers.” It was silly, but fun, he says.
The company has never quite recovered after the pandemic – there’s not much need for workwear when many people work from home in the comfort of a tracksuit. Meanwhile, Brexit, he says, “was a nightmare”. Last year, Paul Smith made a loss of more than £22m and, Smith says, “we’ll lose again this year, but luckily I’ve got enough [to cover it]”. But he adds, “we’re going down the right route now. We’re on the verge of breaking even again.” The world is tough: “wars everywhere”. And unlike the energy and optimism of the 70s, 80s and 90s, it feels as if the general mood among people, he says, is worry. Smith has survived recessions and the 2008 financial crash. Does this period feel more difficult? “To me, it does. I’m not sure whether it is, but to me it does.” One reason is that independent shops are struggling – Smith has always sold to other boutiques, and they’re closing rapidly, hit by high costs and fading high streets. Is he an optimist? “I personally am, because I’m so full of joy the whole time – and positivity.”
As the majority owner, Smith runs the company as he wants. “The good thing is that your expectations are your expectations, they’re not the shareholders’ expectations,” he says. “As soon as you’re in a commercial situation, it’s all about the profit, the expansion, and I’ve seen so many lovely companies die because of financial takeovers.” When he says “die”, I realise he doesn’t mean they collapse, but lose their soul – which I think, to him, is the same thing. In his book, though, he writes about feeling a pang of envy if he heard about Prada, say, opening a new shop. Less so now, though. “Over the years you make comparisons and you think: ‘Oh, should I be doing that?’ In the last two or three years I’ve grown out of that.”
Smith received many big offers to sell throughout his career. Why didn’t he? “I like my job, I love going into work. I love the fact that you can have an idea and turn it into reality, I think that’s really exciting.” Although he certainly is rich, there’s also a modesty to him. He drives his Mini to work, and while he and Pauline live in a swanky part of west London, it’s in the same home they’ve owned since 1980. He was never motivated by money, he says. “We don’t desire jets, we don’t desire grand things, and that was always it, right from the beginning.” What did he want to achieve when he set out? “This sounds crass and stupid, but just a nice life, a nice day. Pauline and I were in love, we are in love still. And luckily we’ve done well.”
The DNA of the brand is so wrapped up in Smith, will it survive without him? “I don’t know. I think so, because there’s enough key people who understand it. It will change, of course it will change, but the basic DNA should stay the same. [It] should be a company that’s modest, down to earth, gives good service, respects people.” It does, sadly, sound a little old-fashioned and idealistic in our brazen capitalist age. Smith points out they have new executives, including a new managing director, who “come from very commercial backgrounds, so the wish for me is getting the balance right. I think I probably am such an oddball in today’s world that you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got a team behind you.”
Smith has no intention of retiring. “I don’t think Pauline would want me at home,” he says. His latest passion is Paul Smith’s Foundation, passing on knowledge and skills – and eventually bursaries – to young designers and entrepreneurs. “All the things I didn’t know at 20 is what I’m trying to help them with.” Not just the sexy stuff like design, but essential things such as VAT and contracts. He intends to leave all his money to the foundation. “Literally everything,” he says. (Pauline has her own wealth from selling her stake in the company and will look after the family, he says.) “My wish is to just help future generations.” He is appalled at big fashion brands who employ young designers straight out of college, “draining the ideas from them” and then putting them out of a job within a few years.
Smith wrote his book with these young designers in mind. “I wanted a book that helps people in the creative industry realise that you can do it a different way,” he says. But lots of us could do with being reminded, from Smith’s account, about what makes a good life – curiosity, creativity, humour, looking after people, and ambition but not greed. In a challenging world, he stays upbeat, he says, with “humour, a lovely team, not taking myself too seriously”. Plus, working in his shops, chatting to customers, taking delight in the art on the walls and the beautiful things he helps to create or find. He isn’t so different from the young man who opened his first shop 56 years ago. “I definitely think I’m still a shopkeeper.”
Threads: My Life in Style by Paul Smith is published on 10 September by Macmillan, in hardback, ebook and audio, read by Bill Nighy. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
