The Joyful Funhouse World of Paul Smith

In this interview – originally recorded for the Time Sensitive podcast, produced by the New York–based media company The Slowdown, and excerpted exclusively in these pages – Smith discusses his deep, 40-plus-year engagement with the country of Japan; how two gifts from his father changed the course of his life and career; and his ever-growing collection of rabbit ephemera.

SPENCER BAILEY: I'd like to start this interview on the subject of Japan. This year [2024] marks 40 years since you first opened your Tokyo store. Japan is your brand's strongest international market and, over the past four decades, you've opened 165 stores across the country – just in Japan. [Laughs]

PAUL SMITH: I know.

SB: Let's start with your first trip there. It was in 1983. What brought you there? How'd you respond to the place? How do you think you became such a phenomenon so quickly?

PS: Well, I was standing in my store in Covent Garden – I was often in the store myself – and my office was above, and this Japanese gentleman came in, and he said, "Can I talk to you?" I said, "Yeah, of course." He had more about me than I had about me, which was press cuttings, photographs, fashion shows. He turned out to be a scout looking for European designers. There was one Italian, one French, and I was the English/British one. They ended up choosing me, and then they invited me to go to Japan in '83. I went with my wife because we always used to try to go to a brand new place together. The two of us went economy via Alaska – with my long legs. [Laughter]

SB: Oof.

PS: It was nine hours to Alaska and then another nine hours. Then we got on the train. We flew to Tokyo because there was no direct flight to Osaka, but the company I was working with was from Osaka.

Then we got on the bullet train, which of course was very exciting. The thing that blew my mind was that we arrived in Osaka and the train pulled in and the three people we were meeting were standing at the door where I was getting out. It seemed like, "How do they know which coach I'm in?" And they said, "Mr. Paul, we are very sorry." And I said, "Sorry?" "Train is three minutes late," they said to me, and that was the start of the phenomenon of my relationship with Japan.

It went on from there, and I've been well over a hundred times now. I think the success is just based on the love of Japan and my work ethic and trying to calmly understand both people's points of view, really.

SB: Tell me some of your experiences there that maybe stand out, including, perhaps, befriending Rei Kawakubo – that might be one.

PS: Yes. The first thing probably was the fact that, in '82, '83, there were very few gaijin – foreigners. And being quite tall, if you came across a group of school children, it was always, "Ohhh!" That was absolutely mad and interesting. Of course, now we're so familiar with Japanese food, but then, the food was amazing and different. I was so fortunate that I had one Japanese friend who was a designer who was making some bags called Porter. They were quite cult then and continued to be thought of very highly. We were good mates.

So I met him, and he then introduced me to a lot of people from the press and stylists. One of the people was Rei Kawakubo from Comme des Garçons, who is notorious in being quite shy, quite hard to have a conversation with and almost impossible to actually ever meet. But we met and became quite good friends. Still, if I go there, I will try and speak to her if she's in town.

SB: You're someone who can truly say, "I'm big in Japan." [Laughter]

PS: Yes, that's true. In more ways than one, yes.

SB: You mentioned you've made more than a hundred trips there. You go, from what I understand, at least twice a year for around 10 days each.

PS: Yes.

SB: Beyond the business, what's kept you so engaged and wanting to keep going back?

PS: I made a lot of good friends there that are not my world – not in fashion. There's a very beautiful magazine called Casa Brutus, and it's one of my favourite magazines in the world, and Pen magazine, as well. And both of those, the editors and the writers for those magazines are just so interesting and so passionate about the subject that they're working on. It could be ceramics or pottery or something, and the ghost from Raku ware and Bernard Leach and the history of Raku ware in Kyoto. But then they're talking about mountain pottery and the finesse of creating a piece of pottery, and they just dig in deeper than anybody else, really. If they were doing a magazine on pen knives, there'd be, like, forty pages of pen knives.

SB: There are many quite obvious connections between your background and interests and what you do and Japanese culture. There's, of course, the craftsmanship, but there's also the attention to detail, the obsessiveness with going in depth in one area or even just the surreal juxtapositions between things.

PS: Yes, the love of contradiction and opposites. I'm constantly playing with big and small or rough and smooth or kitsch and beautiful. I did a collaboration of shirts with Comme des Garçons, and they were all hand-buttonholed and hand-stitched, and they were absolutely mad. They probably never sold one, but both Rei and I adored the project because it was so self-indulgent. [Laughs]

Then I fell in love with Japanese joinery and woodwork, for instance, and learned a lot about why their joints are so intricate, which I never realised. But years and years and years ago, all the houses were wood and they were built out of wood that was quite mature and had for a long time just been sitting there. But then, eventually, as they built more and more houses, the wood wasn't so mature and often because it's very humid, often the joints would just twist and they weren't that stable. So they invented all these amazing woodwork joints, which were double joints so that they couldn't twist. Things like that, where just the passion and the detail…. It's just lovely.

SB: You've spoken about how in Japan they respect age, that wisdom.

PS: Yeah, I love that.

SB: This feels like something we should adopt in Western culture more. I'm not saying that we don't, but we definitely don't to the degree that they do in Japan. What do you think about that?

PS: The whole world is moving so fast that I don't think we consider many things enough anymore. I don't think we appreciate every day like we should. I don't think we appreciate simple things like conversation, love, touch, emotion, calm, hobbies. What's so lovely there is that they really respect experience. With an older person, yes, you might not be able to walk very well or you might be hard of hearing, but they really respect that you've led a life which is to do with a certain job or a certain way of life, or you've brought your family up in a certain way, and it's really charming and lovely, really great.

SB: Now that you're 77 and you have more than five decades in business, a remarkable feat – more than remarkable – what are the bigger reflections that you have about the subject of age or about things that occur over a long span of life experience?

PS: I think the first thing is that I've been in business for, I think, 54 years this year. The thing I'm most proud of, really, is continuity. Especially in business, so many people just want to build a business which they then sell on after 10 years or 15 years – that's the whole motivation is to actually build a business to then sell. So continuity has been really, really lovely.

Getting older, I think the key thing is not being too proud or silly to think that you can't relinquish some of the points of your business to younger staff and trying to observe the talent of younger people around you, and then really bringing them on to have a bigger job. And that's, for a lot of autocratic people, which probably I am, I don't really know, but just try and make sure that you've got a team around you that you give them a chance rather than always try to interfere with the decisions they're making.

SB: As I was preparing for this interview, I was looking at what's been written about you over the years, trying to decipher and understand what drives your success. Of course, a lot of people have written about this notion of "classic with a twist," which goes back to the early eighties. But The Guardian has said, "He has always succeeded because he has anticipated the shape of things to come."

PS: Yeah, I think that's true.

SB: So this forward-looking quality. And the Financial Times has mentioned your "good-natured boyish enthusiasm."

PS: Yeah, I think both of those are true. [Laughter] Hopefully you've seen that already today.

SB: Our friend [the design critic and editor] Deyan Sudjic has written of the "private flamboyance with public sobriety" of your clothes, which is, I thought, a really interesting way of speaking to the visual charm that is the Paul Smith brand.

PS: Yeah, well, they're all lovely things – thank you, all of you – but I'm interested in life. I'm interested in new ways of doing things, and I'm interested in communication. I'm interested in why, how. I suppose it's childlike rather than childish. It's the fact that you question, "I wonder why that bottle has got a dimple in it," and then you realise it's very sensible, because that's exactly where your thumb and your first finger go to stop you dropping it. So there's all sorts of everyday observations that – things you notice.

You know, even just coming from the airport today, I took two, three photographs out of the car window of billboards that had been graffitied, and they had interesting graphics on them, and that’ll probably end up turning up as an element of a shirt print or on a window or something.

SB: Turning to your personal collection of art, objects, and ephemera, one element of it that I find really entertaining are the bunny rabbits that have seemed to sprout up everywhere.

PS: That was a huge mistake because obviously what I should have said was diamonds, because I was on a train in the eighties with a friend from New York, actually, on a train travelling, and I was daydreaming looking out the window. He said, "Why are you looking so intently out of the window?" I said, "If I see a rabbit, my next collection will sell really well." I just made it up. And he came back to New York and sent me a rabbit, and he told somebody who told somebody, now I get between six and twenty rabbits a week. As I said, what I should have said was diamonds – "I'm looking for diamonds, between six and twenty a week." That would be brilliant. [Laughter]

Yeah, so we've got boxes and boxes of rabbits everywhere. Wooden ones, ceramic ones, rather beautiful ones, little kitsch ones. We've got one rabbit sender from Rimini, Italy, who sends rabbits on a very regular basis. What's so delightful is that there's never a demand, which I think in this "What's in it for me?" world is really amazing. It's just so humbling.

SB: And you've used this humble medium of clothing to actually transfix and transform some of these people's lives.

PS: Yes. Without knowing it, just probably the little sense of humour that – you open a jacket and see that there's a patterned lining or the sweater I'm wearing with a little hidden stripe at the back that you don't see from the front. Just little things.

SB: Let's go back to your upbringing in Nottingham, England. You were the youngest of three children by eight years. Your father, Harold Smith, was a credit draper, and I think perhaps more importantly in your life story, a passionate amateur photographer and co-founder of a camera club. When you were 11, he gave you these two life-changing gifts: a camera and a pale-blue Paramount bicycle.

Let's start with the camera. Looking back now, how do you think about how taking pictures has transformed your life? Even listening to you talk about the pictures you took on the way from the airport today – there's your dad's impact.

PS: A Kodak Retinette camera with his Zeiss lens. He built a darkroom in the attic of our house. And my father – are you familiar with Heath Robinson?

SB: No.

PS: Heath Robinson was this completely mad inventor, and I'm sure my father was Heath Robinson number two. The ladder to get into the attic was held by a piece of rope and a weight made out of a paint tin and filled with lead…. There were all sorts of mad things.

What was amazing about the camera was the fact that you have – if we talk in inches – you have a quarter of an inch of a viewfinder or one or two centimetres: this tiny little hole where your viewfinder, where you look through to get your shot, what you're going to look at…. And of course, it was film, so it was pocket money. It was a roll of 12. You didn't see the photograph until you finished the roll and you developed it, so every shot was precious. Now, of course, we take twenty pictures at a time with our camera, which is a phone, and then delete them. The thing was, looking through this little gap, it taught me to look and see, which never had occurred to me before.

The other thing I learned from my father was humour. He was a great communicator, but also he worked. I came home from school one day and in the garden there was the white sheet from my parents' bed on a washing line, and then three fruit boxes with a rug on top of them that was wired at the edge. He said, "Oh, before you do your homework, just sit on the rug and pretend you're flying." I was like, "Dad, I've got my—" "It won't take a minute. It won't take a minute." So I sat there, age 11 or something, cross-legged with my arms lifted up as though I was on a flying carpet. And three weeks later or something, he showed me this photograph of the famous Brighton Pavilion in the south of England with its onion-shaped top to it – it looked like it was from the Orient or somewhere – and I was flying across this pavilion on a rug. Of course, he'd taken the two negatives and put them together. That was mind-blowing.

Then the Paramount bike was a second-hand bicycle bought from a man from the camera club. He said, "If Paul ever wants to join the local cycle club" – called the Beeston Road Club – "he'd be welcome. And if he wants to come out at the weekend with the club members, there's normally about 20 of us. We'll make sure we take care of him." So at the age of 12, I started doing that, and then that same year I started racing and realised that I liked the camaraderie of racing. That helped me in my business, definitely, about playing to strengths and weaknesses. The day you're on a mountain, you help the mountain climber and the day you're on the flat, you help the sprinter. So with 1600 staff, you understand people's strengths and weaknesses and use them accordingly.

SB: Of course, this led to your introduction to Pauline [Denyer], your wife, who was a fashion graduate of the Royal College of Art – first became your girlfriend, then business partner, then designer, and then wife. Speak a bit about her impact on Paul Smith.

PS: Enormous impact. In fact, I would say, without being too humble, that I probably wouldn't be sitting here without her influence, because she went to the Royal College at a time when they were still teaching couture fashion. That's very much about how things are made. She used to talk in these strange terms, almost talking about architectural terms, like the proportion of the pockets and the opening of the rise of the trouser or the opening of the jacket.

She would talk about Palladio and I'd have no idea what she was talking about – the perfect proportion that Palladio did with these buildings – and then the perfect proportion of two pockets sitting on the side of a jacket, and then how they were made and what pad stitching was and what a dart did.

What does a dart do? A dart creates fullness at the end when it finishes, and that's how you get the piece that goes over your chest. And then, of course, she was there with David Hockney, Peter Blake, Joe Tilson, all those pop artists… a very important time at the Royal College, as well, because she's a bit older than me. She came to Nottingham to live with me, and I was living at home with my parents still. It was fairly mind-blowing. Two dogs, two cats, two kids, and a lady from London, aged 21.

SB: Right, she had brought two kids from a previous....

PS: Yeah, she was married with, I think they were 5 and 7 or 6 and 8, something like that.

SB: And you're 21 at the time?

PS: Yeah. So I got instant family. Two Afghan hounds – and I looked exactly like an Afghan hound. [Laughter] And two long-haired cats, two-long haired kids, and suddenly renting an apartment and having to suddenly worry about how am I going to afford to keep….

Luckily, she was earning quite good money. We lived together for many, many years. Then she said, "I've got to go and live back in London." She's a Londoner. She was famously at the Hammersmith Art School, aged 15, and I think she's still the youngest person ever to go to the Royal College. When we both moved, in her case, back to London. Then I moved to London, and it was good. And then eventually she said she wanted to get married. So we got married and, completely by chance, it turned out that I got knighted on the same day, which was not planned at all.

SB: This was in 2000, right?

PS: Yeah. I got knighted in the morning. She became a Lady [laughs], and then got married in the afternoon, and then a party at the Tate Modern in the evening. It was a busy day. [Laughter]

SB: Speaking of Nottingham, I just want to touch on that because it's really the roots of the brand. You opened the first shop in 1970, just two days a week, but it was open. Then in 1974 you incorporated the company and opened your first full-fledged Paul Smith shop, also in Nottingham. But it was your first London shop that I think really brought the awareness. This was in 1979 at 44 Floral Street in Covent Garden. I wanted to bring up this Floral Street space because it's quite remarkable. It's a compound, really.

PS: Deyan wrote very nicely about it for Design Week, I think it was called. He said there was no other shop like it. The first minimal shop in England, as far as I know. It was quite a few years later when the Japanese came to Europe in the eighties, '82, '83, but it was very minimal. It was done with a friend of mine from the Slade School of Art, who was a sculptor. He and I loved Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, and the dream was: shutter-board, concrete staircase. Because I'd bought the building in '76, all on borrowed money, and then couldn't afford to do anything to it. I'd never been inside.

But I bought it by looking at it from the outside, from a retired baker whom I'd never met, who was very kind because he indirectly lent me the money to buy it. And then when I eventually went inside, I realised that it didn't have a staircase, but it had four floors, and it had a goods lift for bananas – not even a lift that you could stand in. It was just for boxes of fruit. So the process was long, but it was fantastic in the end.

I think that was really the key to knowing people like Deyan Sudjic, Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, Vico Magistretti.

SB: It built a community around the....

PS: Yeah. All came to this shop, John Hegarty and a lot of the Saatchis, Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, all those people just came to... It was tiny, the shop. Tiny, tiny, tiny […]. 300 square feet, on the ground floor. But it was just so modern and so different. Also, it tied in with me going to Japan for the first time. So I'd bring back these amazing things like matte black watches and matte black cigarette lighters and a watch that was a robot and used to talk.

On top of that, I managed to get to know Dieter Rams, and I was the first person to stock the Braun calculator. There was the Braun calculator, a matte black watch, a pen from the Pompidou Centre, which has the famous ventilation… The pen was like the ventilation shaft that curved at the top. My little shop attracted all these people who adored design.

SB: Today, you have shops in more than 70 countries around the world, from New York to Los Angeles to Paris and Hong Kong. You've said, "Our business was built very gently and very slowly." Obviously, from that first Floral Street shop to now, it's quite a journey. What would you say has been your philosophy, if there is one, on scale and growth – day by day, month by month, year by year?

PS: The main thing is that Pauline and I started the business when I was 21 because we thought it might be a nice way to earn a living, and that was it. So it's never been, really, about money and expansion. Of course we've been offered – and now that I'm 77, maybe I will think about letting somebody buy into it or something. Because you can't be around forever, but we've never been attracted by any of that at all. But as you get to a certain age, you think, "Well, maybe it's the time to take care of the younger staff and do something like that."

It's never been a business that's been motivated by money. It's been motivated by having a great day and really enjoying it.

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This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity. Listen to the interview in full at timesensitive.fm or on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.