Not your average Smith

A highly talented fashion designer with international acclaim isn't someone you would usually expect to be on the end of your internal phone. "Allo! It's Paul Smith!"

As a teenager he aspired to be a racing cyclist and admits to not having very much interest in fashion or clothes, however at the age of 17 he hit a car while on his bicycle and was hospitalised for several months. This was the end of his cycling career as he had trouble bending his leg after the accident. To console himself, he went out to a pub in his home town of Nottingham, for a drink with some friends. "This pub was where all the art students hung out," he remembers, and the graphic designers, photographers, painters and architects who surrounded him gradually introduced him to their enthusiasm for Pop Art, the Bauhaus school in Germany and "swinging London". It was these influences which sparked of his desire for a career in design. "It changed my life really, all this new stuff coming into it. I was fascinated by the whole world of design". He got a job running a small clothes shop in Nottingham, and developed as a designer through it. "It was remarkably rare at that time to have an interesting clothes shop in a provincial town." There must indeed have been something special about it, because it attracted the attention of a young woman who had trained as a designer at the Royal College of Art in London, Pauline Denyer, who was to become his wife. She was teaching in Nottingham for two or three days a week, and she helped him to develop his design process. "Then we fell in love and the rest, as they say, is history!"

Smith's boutique in Nottingham only sold menswear, and although he started a women's line ten years ago, he confesses to preferring to design men's clothes. "I know more about it, being a man! It's just an extension of the things I like - what I fancy wearing." He describes the women's collections as "very tough. It's a whole image, a lifestyle. And when you get to the catwalk shows there's all the hair and make-up... and anyway, girls have all those sticky-out bits! With a man it's basically straight all the way up and down. You really have to know what kind of girl you're designing for." Despite these difficulties, his own words sum up his women's collections: "So far, so good!"

"It's the birth of the ideas that's really exciting, whether it's an entire collection, or one specific item. Especially if it turns into reality." Smith's autobiography is entitled, 'You Can Find Inspiration In Everything... and if you can't, look again!' which shows the extent of his muses. He puts it mainly down to observation and travel. "It can be something completely practical like the pocket on a postman's jacket that's there for a purpose, or the ethnic fabrics of the local people's clothes while I'm on holiday." He really does seem to take inspiration for his designs from anywhere and everywhere. "I can be looking at a book about Egypt and see the exotic stripes on a Bedouin tent and think if I changed the dimensions a little, those stripes could be translated into a shirt."

He talks with great excitement and energy and divulges that he is very surprised by the way his life has turned out.

"I can be showing someone around my buildings in London and suddenly think to myself: my God, I pay all these people's wages! And there are 600 people working for me in England. I sometimes feel as though my life is behind glass, like I can't quite touch it. It all just sort of happened; there was no plan at all. The phrase I use is that it kind of 'flopped' along! It almost feels too good everyday, like something has to go wrong at some point... but that's often to do with what you give as well."

Smith's humility and bemusement about his own life are just another dimension of his chatty, bubbly personality. "There are still people I meet who used to buy clothes from my boutique in Nottingham. I was always chatting even if they had no money!" Yet he is very much a private person; he doesn't like the "kissy-kissy functions" he gets invited to and he tried not to clutter his own head with other designers' work, although he admits to admiring Jean Paul Gaultier for his sense of humour as well as his talent, which is understandable, given his own sense of humour. If Alexander McQueen is the "enfant terrible" of British fashion, and Matthew Williamson is the darling, what is he? "The old bore!" he shouts through warm laughter. In a lower, horror-movie-intro style voice he adds: "The Godfather of fashion!" There is a slight pause while he stops laughing. "I really don't know, I'm just there. I'm secure. I've never been number one, but I've never not been. Perhaps I'm the thinking man's designer. I think you can tell I'm very down to earth."

"Fashion is all over the place at the moment. Modern communication means there's so much information around about fashion that people do their own thing a lot more. 25 years ago, you could have said "Spring 2004 will be about short skirts and big buttons..." but now it's a lot more general. There's a lot of pattern, print and colour around at the moment, perhaps because people want to feel more positive." He tells me that he has "no big major plans" for the future, but has shops opening in LA, New York, Paris, Shanghai, Bangkok and Japan as well as developing his non-clothes related lines- "furniture, watches, pens, fragrance... Architecture is a big influence, so I'm really excited about that."

Finally I tell him of the survey which declared Oxford students as the least fashionable in the country, and ask him to give us a hand by designing a uniform to make us more stylish. But apparently he's "completely at ease with how anyone wants to look. It's more about people's brains and personality. University is an important time; you find your own style as your mature." Not really the answer I wanted. "Ah well, I'm a Cancer you see. Cancer the crab, always walking sideways round questions."

12th Feb 2004

The Oxford Student - Official Student Newspaper

Not your average Smith

Articles in this issue

Articles in this section