Paul Smith: A True Brit but Not for ‘Men Only’
New York Times
By SUZY MENKES
International Herald Tribune
An early bird breakfast opened London Fashion Week on Tuesday as a debate raged over why Britain is the creative fashion capital of the world – but fails to be a commercial force in the global luxury market
The event was hosted by the Centre for Fashion Enterprises, a business incubator for talent hoping to make the United Kingdom a focus for fashion start-ups.
Conspicuous for his absence among the panelists – from college professors and investors to fledgling designers who are being helped with management and funding – was the single British designer who has made it big: Paul Smith.
Smith turns 60 in July – just one of several current landmarks in the designer’s career as a quirky ambassador for True Brit tradition with witty, well-crafted menswear. It is 30 years since he made his first Paris menswear presentation in 1976. And last month, a 40 percent stake in his company was sold to the Itochu Corporation of Japan, his long-term collaborators.
The Smith story is the stuff of fashion legend and it has nothing to do with venture capital or talent spotting.
A dyslexic, uneducated errand boy in a garment factory in his native Nottingham at age 15, Smith opened his tiny local shop on weekends at age 18 and, with the help of Pauline Denyer, a design school teacher who became his partner in life and work, he launched his label.
Growing organically from that seed, Paul Smith has blossomed into a £350 million, or $595 million, business with a profit of £26 million in 2004, figures he tosses out from his head. The company has no debt and Smith describes it as “incredibly liquid,” hence the big luxury groups banging on his door through the free-spending 1990s.
Smith has this to say to the myriad designers who will set off showers of sparky talent in London this week.
“Try to understand the trade you wish to be in,” says Smith, who can still be seen on the shop floor of his town house store in London’s Notting Hill.
“Unfortunately, so many of young designers think networking and publicity are the most important things,” he says. “But they are only aspects. They are only important if you design something people want to buy.”
The designer is known for having an open door for young talent looking for avuncular advice – although the tall, wiry-haired Smith is likely to pull a rubber duck out of his pocket or to show off the odd-ball collection of objects cluttering his office, before he offers the wisdom of experience.
“Such a cocktail of ingredients is required,” says Smith, saying that designers who go through the fashion school education system “only have one side of scale.”
“Galliano can go to a company that takes care of things, but when you are starting out, you have got to be more of an all-rounder,” he said, referring to the British designer John Galliano at Dior in Paris.
In Japan, Smith was both merchant and pioneer. He first went in the 1980s, when he and Pauline flew economy class, “humbled by the experience” and “so excited at such a brilliant thing.” The contract they signed was for a mere £15,000 for the year.
It was the start of a long and deep relationship as Smith traveled constantly to Japan, while most western designers just took the royalty checks.
“I think a lot of people took whole experience as disrespectful to the Japanese,” Smith says. “They took lots of cash and did not put in much. I was so excited. I did it the Japanese way, built relationships and they felt an affinity with me. I felt there was a real partnership. Pauline used to say that was the one place ‘where they really appreciated your ability’.”
Denyer and Smith were finally married in 2000, on the day Smith was knighted by Queen Elizabeth. It is his wife’s 25 percent share in the business (and the 15 percent share of managing director John Morley) that has been sold to Itochu for an undisclosed sum. Smith says that he in no way intends to retire but it is “a case of preparing for getting older,” since they have no family in the business and Pauline wants to spend time with her grandchildren.
Although she has always been a discreet figure, Smith lauds his wife for her contribution to his success, citing her enduring emotional support and her down-to-earth attitude.
“We have been so in love – we are not searching for anything,” he says, referring to the stability of a solid home life, which has included his own father, whose strong personality Smith captured in a book.
Denyer also brought something else: her understanding of cutting and technique which is the bedrock of Smith’s success. He defines a moment in the 1960s, when Denyer was teaching pattern cutting at the Royal College of Art and the design world was on the cusp of switching from couture techniques to ready to wear. His mentor took him at age 21 to the Paris couture shows of Chanel, Courrèges, Patou and Yves Saint Laurent.
“Because of that grounding, Pauline taught me what the function of a dart is,” Smith says. “I learned that construction and proportions can be compared to Palladio and great architecture and the rhythm of building. That is why our tailoring is so popular – we sell 200,000 suits a year.”
On Wednesday, Smith is taking a new step towards a success that has so far eluded him in his women’s show: tailoring with a new line called ironically “Men Only.” He has added “by popular demand” (and with Katherine Hepburn as his muse) key masculine pieces feminized with tucks, colored buttons pretty linings and his signature cocktail of stripes.
They will be found in the fall in the expanding universe of Paul Smith stores, each individual spaces with odd-ball artifacts. They range from the graceful Willoughby House, the 18th-century mansion that Smith opened back in Nottingham, to the funky Curiosity Shop opened last year in London’s Mayfair and the flamingo pink building on Melrose Avenue, Los Angeles. That is an attempt to bring Smith’s powerful personality to America, where he has never had the same fame as in Japan, in spite of a successful New York store (and another opening imminently in SoHo) and wide distribution in Neiman Marcus stores.
A new Tokyo store will open in April, all glass and steel, with a rooftop garden and an exhibition space in which he will promote British designers and artists. “I feel very British – and I do feel a traveling ambassador,” says Smith.
And what is his advice to a young hopeful working on a debut runway show? “We never grew the business too fast,” he says. “We invested in real estate. And never forget that the VIP is the customer who walks into the shop to buy something.”
