How the fashion designer Sir Paul Smith got his start on training wheels.

You may know Sir Paul Smith as the designer who shook up tailoring with his subtle yet humorous designs. You may know him as the chairman and chief designer of a global empire worth around £300m. But what you may not know is that a lot of his initial inspiration came from the humble sport of cycling. As Mr David Millar mentions in the foreword of Sir Paul’s new cycling book Paul Smith’s Cycling Scrapbook, out today, “No doubt some people have thought Paul mad for holding on to his love of cycling through thick and thin. Now that many more are beginning to understand, I hope they will see why he has.”

Robbed of a professional career by a broken femur bone at the age of 17, cycling was very much Sir Paul’s first passion as a child. “Cycling has always been the sport for me,” he says. “You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I was attracted by its sense of style.” But as the book and its startling array of historical photographs, news clippings and ephemera show, his appreciation of the sport goes a little deeper than appearance.

Such is his love of bikes, for example, that his London headquarters are often mistaken by visitors for a “bike shed” (it contains a frame which once belonged to Mr Mark Cavendish, a fixie made especially for Sir Paul by Mercian and “an extraordinary Soviet-era Russian machine” smuggled into the country from Moscow, among other bikes). The book offers detailed profiles of his favourite riders, including his hero Mr Jacques Anquetil – the first cyclist to win the Tour de France five times – and Mr Fausto Coppi, who, Mr Smith notes, wore a beautiful double-breasted overcoat off the bike (and, according to legend, liked to drink 14 espressos before tackling a mountain stage). The book has a detailed section on some of the world’s greatest races, from Milan’s San Remo and the Paris-Roubaix to the Giro d’Italia – for which he designed the famous pink Maglia Rosa jersey in 2013. And, perhaps most interestingly, when Mr Smith talks about how cycling influenced his designs, instead of focusing solely on the brightly coloured jerseys (although we do get to see his rather impressive collection of these), he considers engraved handlebars, holes drilled in brake levers and decorative lugs as real examples of “fine designs” – and perhaps what made him the fashion designer he is today.

Paul Smith’s Cycling Scrapbook (Thames & Hudson) is out today