“This is hard work!” declared Paul Smith, before theatrically mopping his brow. The 78-year-old designer delivered a bravura performance in Paris this afternoon as he presented 18 looks of his latest menswear collection to a rapt room of menswear pupils. The looks came in three at a time, between pauses for Smith to ebulliently run us through them.
“We’re still an independent company,” said Smith of a format that he first experimented with at Pitti last June. “So I think I can talk directly to you about what I do for a living and the clothes.” He explained how rediscovering a trove of photographs taken by his father Harold had been the starting point for the collection. Harold passed down his passion when he gave 11-year-old Smith his first camera (which he had with him today): “That was when I learned to look and to see.” Harold also ran the local camera club, which every Thursday evening would hold talks on new photographers. Smith combined two of his father’s original photos as prints with clothes that were developed with the aesthetic of some of Harold’s favorite photographers in mind; people like David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and Saul Leiter. “This was in the mid ’60s, an era when, suddenly, people were doing things that broke the rules. Like shooting in the street instead of a studio. Or not wearing a suit.”
Smith looked to apply the same disruptive focus to the collection, presenting five-pocket pants and workwear jackets in twill or sturdily woven wool: “So, it’s denim, but in posh suiting fabrics.” When there were tailored jackets, they were worn with mismatched pants and cut with unorthodox pocket-to-shape placements. Smith also referenced his own disruptive tendencies, telling us how the tightly fitted V-neck sweaters recalled the school uniform sweaters he used to purchase for his ’70s clients including David Bowie and Jimmy Page. His corduroy featured only-you-can-see-it inside mirror-image printing of the velvet stripes, and a new collaboration of Barbour jackets in pleasingly off-kilter colorways contained classically Smith kooky linings, including photographs of birds and a cow. At this point, Smith entertained the audience, and caught a breath, by deploying a gadget that made cow noises.
Smith gave us exposure to many attractive pieces, amongst which the loveliest development was perhaps a raglan-sleeve gray herringbone jacket that looked like it had just been shrugged off the back of some bird-chasing, Chelsea-boot-wearing ’60s press man, quite possibly played by Michael Caine. It appeared beloved and worn thanks to a tumbling treatment in production, and when you ogled further, it looked tangibly heavy to the eye. Once in the hand, however, it was as light as a Kodak Brownie. Another different-era snapshot was delivered via a green leather jacket with a shearling collar that was a riff on a 1970s Bailey-worn fave. Along the way, Smith delivered plenty of menswear nerd zingers, such as the story that the Prince of Wales check had been invented after its Yorkshire designers observed the crisscross pattern of stonewalls on the hills and dales. The references to Harold also included a print of the fastidiously recorded location notes he applied to film transparencies, and some of his doodled drawings applied to jacquard knits and as patches in jackets and shirts. Smith is still looking, still seeing, and still dressing disruptively inclined men of every format with his signature blend of gusto, wisdom, and sympathy.
