In Threads: My Life in Style, Paul Smith looks back on his first 80 years, from the “classic with a twist” suit and his friendship with David Bowie to his signature stripes and curating a Picasso exhibition.

Looking back on the presentation of his first menswear collection in 1976, Paul Smith describes himself not as a designer but as a “doer,” someone who puts things together: his knowledge of the products of English textile companies, his passion for the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, and above all his ability to stay in sync with the evolution of taste in his own time. This was also thanks to what he learned from Joan Burstein, founder of Browns, the South Molton Street shop that redefined London cool in the 1970s by introducing the fashion of Armani, Calvin Klein, and Jil Sander, as well as by buying John Galliano’s graduation collection from Central Saint Martins.
After leaving school at 15, Paul Smith opened a clothing shop in Nottingham, before arriving in London in 1979 on Floral Street, at a time when Covent Garden was little frequented, with no hotels, the market gone, no other shops, and only the Opera House and a couple of pubs still operating.

To attract the attention of people who frequented the area at night, he projected films and slides in the shop window and stocked up on unusual objects in Japan, which he visited regularly. The shop attracted Norman Foster and Ridley Scott, the Beatles and Yohji Yamamoto, Simply Red, and David Bowie.
The Thin White Duke would be among the first to wear his suits in Prince of Wales check, pairing pink and yellow with black and white instead of the traditional blue or burgundy. Bowie also turned to Paul Smith for the matching suits worn by Tin Machine and later asked him for the T-shirt featuring the black star from Blackstar.
Daniel Day-Lewis is also a fan of his bespoke suits, which he wears with a T-shirt and biker boots. He would go on to learn the basics of the trade in Smith’s tailoring atelier while preparing for his role as a couturier in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread.
The suit became a defining element of the brand around 1982, with its softer silhouette and less-padded shoulders compared with traditional styles: formalwear that was finally appealing to younger generations. It was Smith himself who described it as “classic with a twist,” launching a phrase that the fashion system would appropriate and use so pervasively, and often simply for lack of anything else to say, that it eventually emptied it of meaning.

The suit created by Paul Smith became a defining element of the brand around 1982, with a softer silhouette and less-padded shoulders: formalwear that was finally appealing to younger generations.

Another defining symbol of the brand is the Multistripe, launched in 1992 in 14 colors and originally conceived as a seasonal motif. Buyers requested it so insistently that it became a constant, until Sir Paul could no longer stand it and discontinued it despite the loss in revenue. He later brought it back, reworked in the subdued colors of a Frank Auerbach painting at Tate Modern.
Another thing he cannot stand is the comparison with Ralph Lauren and Lauren’s attempt to appropriate the codes of the English aristocracy. By contrast, he is flattered by comparisons with Giorgio Armani, who in 2022, for the issue of Wallpaper he guest-edited, chose Smith as the designer to interview.
Armani summed up their similarities this way: “I think we are both realists. We like dressing people for everyday life and avoiding flights of fancy.”

Womenswear emerged in the 1990s from observing Patti Smith, Jane Birkin, Vanessa Redgrave, and Julie Christie wearing his jackets, as well as from the boyfriend-clothes trend promoted in Vogue shoots by Bruce Weber and Grace Coddington, who repeatedly used his white shirt.
The designer also recalls the exhibition he curated at the Musée Picasso in Paris in 2023, for which he had been promised carte blanche four years earlier. Forced by the museum’s new director to rethink it entirely, Sir Paul was rewarded by the results: Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light recorded record attendance.

Paul Smith Looks Back on 80 Years of Style in 'Threads: My Life in Style'

Recommended posts for you

Fashion