AN INTERVIEW
Which organisation does Paul Smith have today? Paul Smith focuses on the organisation of the Paul Smith house today and on its place in the field of contemporary fashion.
Paul Smith is about spontaneity, energy, life, fun and then, very well-organized company with good manners.
the world of fashion is very very strange and completely odd , with so many collections now. Before, it used to be two collections a year, now I do four a year, deliveries and collections. High street - twelve a year, one a month. Now, you have online fashion, now you have communication through the internet, Facebook, Twitter. Everybody knows what's going on immediately. The seasons have all crashed into each other. The thing is that when you've been in business a long time, a lot of their earlier work is starting to emerge from many other brands. not copying but the trend of embroidery pattern, almost things that...
""too much", is quite popular again now. I think that's because right now business around the world is quite complicated for people. There's an overproduction of product, there's too many shops, too many brands. So people are going like this, they just yeah, "What if we try this? What if we try this one? Let's try this, let's try this!". And so, there is an acceleration of bright, cheerful things, a lot of that comes from my archive, not physically, but you know, in terms of inspiration. my brain is very active and very, I just do my own thing, and I think if people are interested in, not just what I did, but things from that time, then that's fine. But, for the moment I've still got enough for energy and enthusiasm, and curiosity to do my own thing. So it doesn't worry me at all. Well, I mean when I started as a young designer, fashion for men was very simple. Before me, in the 1940's, early 1950's period, every man wore a suit. There was nothing called jeans, or there was no popularity of denim, or anything. Towards the end of the 1950's, you got a little bit of fashion with rock & roll, and then into the 1960's, it became a bit more relaxed. Then, of course, music played a big part in fashion. But only for a tiny section of the population around the world, young people that dressed in quite an extravagant way. But then, as you came into the 1970's and 1980's, magazines in Britain like, one called The Face magazine, Arena magazine, they started to talk about, not just fashion clothes, but actually skincare, about cutting your hair in a certain way, how to coordinate clothes and dress. It's been quite a gradual thing. But now, men's fashion is just equally as fashionable as women's fashion. The differences with men's fashion, apart from a tiny little piece at the top of the fashion world, most guys wear very simple clothes, and as a designer, all you can do is, we say in English "nudge" fashion, not "push" fashion. So, you widen the shoulder, you narrow the shoulder, you widen th lapel, you narrow the lapel, shorter jacket, longer jacket, tighter trouser, baggier trouser, some color, no color...""So you just play, but basically, it doesn't move so radically as women's which of course can be long short, tight, big, flowery, colorful. It's something that has taken a while to change but now is just part of the world. Well I mean, when I first started, I started with men's clothes. "
with no money and no orders. the first collections had to be with fabric which is called "stock fabric". You just bought some fabric where you can buy 5 meters, 10 meters, 20 meters, not 5,000 meters. designing clothes in a simple way, but they always had a very interesting internal part. It was described as "classic with a twist". not trying to shock the world, but trying to make nice clothes with a bit of a surprise or a secret. But then, as you progress, and as you start to sell to more than one country, it's important to play with other things.
Some designers play with extreme fashion. That could mean people like John Galliano, Alexander McQueen, and previously Jean-Paul Gaultier. That's where there's more content into the garment, or Vivienne Westwood for instance. Whereas with Paul Smith, basically a jacket looks like a jacket. It will probably have traditional pockets, and the length will be quite classic, but it'll be made very soft, or it'll have a stronger shoulder, or an interesting fabric. All I've ever done is really wanted to make clothes that people enjoy, but are not really attention-seeking clothes.
Of course, anybody's looking to say "Well what about your last fashion show? It's full of attention-seeking clothes". You're absolutely right, but a fashion show, that's the job of a fashion show. The job of the fashion show is that you have 12 minutes and half a million pounds to show half of the catwalk that your clothes sell on there called the buyers, on the other half of the catwalk which we call the press that you have new ideas. If you showed on the catwalk things that really sell, everybody would fall asleep, but because you show things which are innovative, unusual, directional, then hopefully that keeps your image strong. If you talk about image, I, and your viewers might not quite understand what I'm saying, but image is Friday and Saturday. "When I opened my shop, on Fridays and Saturdays that was about image, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday was about learning, and about earning money. The thing about image is "yes of course, it's important" because as I said earlier if you only have image, you probably won't survive, and if you have only basics, you probably will close down because there's a lot of competition in that world, especially today's world because now you have all the high street brands. So, the thing about image is it's really important providing you have the balance of product which will pay the rent."
Communication, especially with a brand which has been around for a long time, you're constantly, not reinventing, but moving, and the danger of many brands which have fallen by the wayside and closed down is because there were too rigid, they weren't willing to play with new ideas, they were in fact often too stubborn, or snobbish, or full of ego, that they wouldn't, they said "we do things this way and we don't need to do that", but fashion is about today and tomorrow, and probably the most important sentence is that nobody cares how good you used to be, very important.
Paul Smith, has been around for a long time, the joy of Paul Smith is that we are an independent company, we've not been eaten by one of the big corporations, although we've been approached many times. The joy of being independent is that you can be spontaneous.
"The only person I have to answer to is the man I meet in the morning when I'm having a shave. "What do you want to do today Paul? What shall we do? Shall we look at a new shop in Rome? Yeah maybe". It's a very privileged position to be in, it's very wonderful."
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