EVOLVE
FOR THE MODERN RENAISSANCE MAN
P aul Smith. Faster than a model speed-changing backstage, Sir Paul Smith slips into a fresh facial expression. His comfortably craggy, 1946-vintage features rearrange themselves out of twinkly, avuncular benevolence (the Paul Smith default setting) into serious mode: pursed lip, narrowed eye and furrowed brow. It is halfway through our helter-skelter hour, and the chat's looped back to the very first thing he mentioned (after sitting me down and offering toast). 'Unfortunately,' says a suddenly stern Sir Paul, 'so many young people these days live their lives like a business plan. They think that is what they have to do to progress to whatever it is they want.' He exhales, and half-shakes his luxuriantly coiffed head. 'Just the obsession with money, and success, and ego - and celebrity! Be it Z-list, it's just this desire for celebrity‌'
Steady on, Sir P! Pot, kettle etc. For surely his last womenswear show, held at Tate Britain in February, featured a bona fide ABC1-list celeb, sat bold as brass on the front row? In fact, Alan Yentob's presence was so compelling that half of The Daily Telegraph show report was dedicated to the hypnotically erudite way in which the BBC's creative director stroked his chin throughout. Sir Paul's face unclenches, he laughs, and explains, 'He's doing a thing on me.' It emerges that neither Yentob nor Melvyn Bragg have ever 'done a thing' (which translates as make a documentary) on him before. 'I'm too normal,'
he says with a shrug. 'I don't impress them.' This is as ridiculous as it is self-deprecating, for Sir Paul is now, and has been for years, consistently by far and away Britain's most successful designer of clothes.
To wit, he has more than 300 stores and employs about 200 people at his converted red-brick factory between Holborn and Covent Garden, who between them mastermind a 13-strong portfolio of biannual collections. These include homeware, kidswear and (the Yentob-stardusted) womenswear - but more than half of them are for blokes. Because when it comes to menswear Paul Smith is The Man. From the sexy illustrated pin-ups Tony Blair once revealed on his Paul Smith shirt-cuffs to the suits worn by David Cameron, he could easily boast about the bipartisan power base that relishes his tailoring and business-attire sundries - were he the boasting type. Instead he shrugs again. 'Politicians have been wearing them for a long time, and a lot of the financial industry, too. The most common thing is I'll be in an airport or somewhere, and someone will say, "I got hired in one of your suits." Or married. Even that lovely man Timothy Spall, whom I was just taking pictures of, he said, "I got married in one of your suits, Mr Smith." So that was very nice.' Although by no means all about suits (premillennium, I used to nightclub in his sadly now hard-to-find-here R Newbold workwear line; he sells jeans and polos by the hundreds of thousands, and does perfect pared-down architect-wear, too), tailoring is central to the Paul Smith thesis.
The view’s great from here...
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