I never think of myself as a collector of anything. I got asked that recently in a talk I was doing at Oxford University. They said about being a collector and I said, 'No, no, no, I'm not a collector. I do have a large quantity of the same things.' The girl who asked the question said, 'That's called a collector.'
Hello, I'm Paul Smith and I'm a clothes designer, and you're in my studio in London. My building in Covent Garden is four floors and I've got a lot of art, so we fill the staircases full of art. This is a t-shirt by the graphic designer Peter Saville. This is a piece by a guy called Charming Baker, who's a British artist. David Hockney, Bruce Raber the photographer, Shepard Fairey, Patti Smith, Derek Boshier, one of the first pop artists in England in the 1960s at Royal College with Peter Blake and Alan Jones. A lot of art posters which I've collected over the years. Cecil Beaton portraits, David Bailey, Peter Blake original, another Charming Baker, and so it goes.
I think collecting can be very addictive, but for me I don't do it consciously at all. I'll buy something just because I like it or because I've always wanted a piece by somebody, and it could be something from a six-year-old to a famous artist. What I collect, it could be anything. Two things happened at the age of 11. My dad was an amateur photographer. He bought me this camera here and I started taking pictures. Of course it was all film then, and that's helped me massively in being more aware of looking and seeing what I'm looking at. And then I got bought a nice racing bike, and in my head I wanted to be a professional racing cyclist, but then at age 18 I had a bad crash and ended up in hospital for three months. I met some of the other patients and one of them said, 'Oh, let's meet and have a catch up and a drink.' And by chance it was the place where all the art students went. They were talking about people like Oskar Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky just intrigued me with his completely wild colors that I'd never really witnessed before. Sometimes it's a bit embarrassing when I'm pinning somebody's trousers up and then they start talking about this person called Paul Smith. What do you have to slope off? 'Oh, he's supposed to be a nice guy.' Sneak off. Is somebody actually serving?
He's been working the shop floor for more than 50 years, starting with a tiny windowless retail space in Nottingham, England. It was not the career he'd envisioned.
I left school at 15. I wanted to be a bike rider, so I don't have any skills really. I'm not very bright. I said I want to be a racing cyclist and my dad said that's not a real job.
So Smith has found a way to incorporate cycling into this specialty, whether motifs and collections, designing bikes in gear, or just riding to work.
You wanted to be a professional cyclist.
Yes, that was the dream, but it finished very abruptly at 18 after a bad crash. What happened? I ended up being in something called fashion. Things like that became an influence in the printed textiles in my work. That's when I met Pauline as well. She studied fashion at the Royal College of Art. She came to live with me and I opened my own little shop, which was about this big, three meters by three meters, only open on Fridays and Saturdays. And Pauline had taught me at home on the kitchen table about how to cut a pattern, the importance of proportion, shape, how to put a sleeve in, how to make a buttonhole. She had studied fashion but was also very interested in the world of art and architecture, and I became very interested in it because of her really. In the early '70s we went to Hockney's first exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery and there was a print called 'Pretty Tulips.' So either pay the gas bill or buy a David Hockney print. So we bought a print.
I think all the creative areas that we deal with interlink. So you might look at a piece of art and you just see three colors together that you hadn't really thought would work together, and then that could end up being part of an interior of a shop or it could be the colors on a shirt or a dress. So they all run in parallel. We've started to become interested in quite British art, you know, by Hockney and William Coldstream and that whole Slade School. But I've got a really diverse collection. I've got a painting by Banksy and I've got a still life by Kaabier. I've got kit work. I've got all sorts of things. I'm not focused on anything. I buy purely on what I like.
I'm blessed with things being sent to me from all around the world. It's so fantastic in this troubled world we live in that so many of these people send things and there's no demand, it's just communication. It's so humbling. It's fantastic. Look at all those. These are all Japanese gifts.
I get it worked out for you? It worked out. I fell into fashion, yeah.
He's become known for its sartorial simplicity. His clothing designs often give a creative twist to the classics. It was his wife Pauline who taught him to sew.
How do you go from learning how to sew and make a suit at the kitchen table to opening your first store?
Very difficult, I suppose, but the joy then, and not absolutely not now, is that you weren't in a hurry. You're in a hurry now? Well, no, the world is in a hurry. I'm not in a hurry at all.
Smith used savings to open that first shop in 1970, and within six years was hosting a fashion show in Paris at a friend's.
Apartment. Pauline and I sewed all the tracks and the models were just people we knew. The music was on a cassette. Do you remember the cassette? But you can do things in a more humble way, it is possible, and in a way it's more charming. And right now I'm really in the mood to start going back to doing things like that again.
This young a young Michael Jackson. The 78-year-old designer's approach is a contrast to the flashy ego-driven world of fashion, and it carries through to his art-filled London headquarters.
