THE JOURNAL
The British designer pays homage to his American style heroes in this new collection – only on MR PORTER.
Back in 1963, there was nobody in the world cooler than Mr Bob Dylan. Not according to Sir Paul Smith, anyway, who was a 16-year-old cycling enthusiast working in a clothing warehouse in Nottingham when the Nobel Prize-winning songwriter released his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. “The image from the album cover really captures that,” says Sir Paul, speaking to MR PORTER from Japan. “His way of wearing a suede jacket, jeans and a very everyday shirt just seemed so... effortless.” The photograph, which captures a 21-year-old Mr Dylan walking arm in arm through the wintry streets of New York’s West Village with his then girlfriend, Ms Suze Rotolo, so firmly lodged itself in Sir Paul’s imagination that he still makes reference to it more than half a century later. Indeed, it was one of the two pictures that provided the inspiration for his latest collection, which launches this week exclusively on MR PORTER.
The other was of a very different 1960s style icon, President John F Kennedy. Taken in 1962, it shows the President and his wife, Ms Jackie Kennedy, spectating on the first of that year’s America’s Cup races from the deck of the USS Joseph P Kennedy Jr in Newport, Rhode Island. At first glance, there’s nothing remarkable about the President’s outfit of white Oxford shirt, navy blue sweater and grey trousers. But it was a small detail – a pair of hooped athletic socks, worn with formal shoes – that caught Sir Paul’s eye. “He just got it right so consistently,” says the designer. “He’d wear tennis shoes with chino pants and colourful sweaters, all while holding one of the most powerful positions in the world.”
The irony of such a “quintessentially British” brand finding its inspiration in two Americans is not lost on Sir Paul. “Britishness is certainly at the core of the Paul Smith brand, but when I started out in my little three-square-metre shop in Nottingham back in 1970, I was really keen on American style, too,” he says. “At that time, whenever I could, I’d visit the States, I’d travel out with empty bags and come back with as many pairs of Levi’s 501s as I could carry and then sell them from the little shop.” The blending of British and American aspects is mirrored, he says, in the combination of fabrics and textures throughout the collection – a roughly textured bouclé blazer worn with smooth wool trousers, or a Mr Dylan-style suede jacket worn with a JFK-style cotton-cashmere sweater.
One suspects that it wasn’t just these two 1960s style icons, but the spirit of the decade itself, too, that inspired Sir Paul. His youth coincided almost perfectly with the 1960s as a cultural event. He was 17 when President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, an event widely considered to have jump-started the decade’s countercultural revolution. By the time of 1967’s Summer of Love, he was turning 21, and beginning to experiment as a designer. For the now septuagenarian Sir Paul, who will be 71 this July, this collection is more than just a tribute to the heroes of his youth; it’s a return to his roots.
To showcase the collection, we called upon a man who channels the vitality of the era – and bears a striking similarity to another one of its most iconic names. “I look like Mick Jagger, or so I’ve been told,” grins Mr Oli Burslem, the frontman of British rockers Yak, as he lounges on a battered, threadbare sofa in the Elms Lesters Painting Rooms in London. It’s a likeness which helped land him a role in a 2015 Burberry campaign, as part of a cast of Bright Young Things that included stage actor Mr Harry Treadaway and singer-songwriter Mr Tom Odell. He plays his appearance down – “I was just driving the car,” he says – and in truth, it’s hard to imagine this nervy, unpredictable presence sitting comfortably alongside such clean-cut characters.
His stories – like the time he drove an uninsured hearse around the Barbican for four hours in the middle of the night with the bassist from the Jesus and Mary Chain in the back – paint him as a rock ‘n’ roll star in the old mould. And this refreshing lack of PR polish extends to the band’s music: raw, frenetic and very loud, it’s the kind of no-nonsense, rough-and-ready sound that you thought might have died out decades ago. In short, we couldn’t think of anyone better to take us on a trip back to the 1960s.
“It was a time of great change,” Sir Paul recalls of the decade that defined his tastes. “After the horror of world war, it was the first time that people were able to express themselves freely. That made it a very creative time for designers… it was exciting, because it was suddenly acceptable to do things in a different way. The idea of making a shirt in flower-print fabric or a jacket out of velvet was something pretty unexpected, but people would do it as a way of showing that they were an individual. Paul Smith [the brand] is very much built on that ethos: the idea of taking something quite familiar and classical, and then adding an element of the unexpected. Breaking the rules, basically.”
It’s an ethos that has served him well. From that windowless store in Nottingham, Sir Paul has spun a business that now operates hundreds of outlets around the world, including a phenomenal 250 stores in Japan alone. He sells, by his own estimation, somewhere in the region of 100,000 suits a year – “sometimes for graduations, sometimes for court appearances and very often for weddings” – and prides himself, above all, on being consistent. “I’ve never lost sight of who our customer is,” he says.
But while consistency is a necessary condition of the kind of prolonged success that Sir Paul has enjoyed, and certainly explains how he has managed to avoid the fluctuations in fortune that seem to affect other fashion labels, it is not the only secret to his success. Just as important are the clothes themselves. Perhaps better than any other designer working today, Sir Paul understands what the majority of men want from a shirt, a suit or a pair of shoes. They don’t want to be defined by them – they don’t want to be “that guy in the jazzy shirt” – but they don’t want to blend in, either.