Paul Smith

Paul Smith opened his first shop in 1970 at 10 Byard Lane, Nottingham, called Paul Smith Vêtements Pour l’Homme, a single room of twelve feet by twelve feet with Smith’s Afghan hound Homer installed as the first shop manager. The proposition was straightforward: British tailoring loosened up by color, pattern, and a buyer’s eye for what else belonged on the rail, selling a mix of established labels alongside Smith’s own designs. The label that stuck, “classic with a twist,” still describes the work over fifty years on.

Menswear is where the company began and where it remains centered. Six years after opening his store, Paul Smith showed his first collection in Paris. “It was literally four shirts, two pieces of knitwear, one jacket and two trousers,” he said, renting a room in Hotel Odeon and laying out the collection on the bed lit by a clip-on spotlight.

The design language sits in the gap between Savile Row formality and something more eccentric, using Italian mill fabrics, proper canvas-construction tailoring, and the signature stripe for instant identifiability. Recurring pieces include the charm shirt, the Artist Stripe shirt, and the half-canvas suit known as A Suit To Travel In, cut from a high-twist wool that resists creasing through long-haul flights.

Within his generation of British designers, Smith occupies different ground from Vivienne Westwood’s provocation or Margaret Howell’s restraint, working the suit-and-shirt territory shared by Oliver Spencer and Richard James, while pulling in color from Italian sportswear. In 2000, the designer was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace for services to British fashion, and in 2003 he won the Contemporary Designer of the Year Award at the British Fashion Awards.

The business grew outward from Nottingham in stages. Smith opened his flagship London store on Floral Street in Covent Garden in 1979 and expanded internationally through the 1980s. The first Japanese store opened in Tokyo in 1984, followed by a New York shop on Fifth Avenue in 1987. Womenswear arrived in 1993.

In 2006, Smith acquired a new business partner in his longtime Japanese licensee Itochu, which bought an initial 34 percent stake, later increased to 40 percent. The deal followed Pauline Denyer Smith and managing director John Morley selling their combined shares, though Smith has always held majority control of the business.

Sir Paul still owns 60 percent of the business and remains creative director. What began in that Nottingham room has grown to 130 shops in over 60 countries. Today, the brand sits in the British designer tier below the conglomerate houses. Its customer wants a navy suit, a striped shirt, and a colored sock, and buys into a wardrobe meant to be worn for years. Its standing is unusual, an independent designer label of real scale that still answers to its founder.