From There To Here: The Adventures Of Paul Smith
THE CRASH
Nottingham, 1963
It’s a stationary vehicle that indirectly ignites Paul Smith’s acceleration. He works in a clothing warehouse, but plans to be a professional racing cyclist. One day, out training, head down and... Aged 17, his dream crashes when he does, into the back of a stopped car: the result is a broken kneecap, several ribs, collarbone, nose, finger and femur. “It was terrifying! I spent three months in the hospital with my leg in traction, a long recovery. But without that crash, I don’t think everything that happened afterwards would have...”
THE KISS
Nottingham, 1967
After his bicycle crash calamity, Smith had – via the friends made while convalescing in hospital – got to know a group of students at Nottingham’s School of Art. “When I was out of the hospital I used to go to a pub that a lot of the art students went to – I was working as a shop assistant at the time. And one day I was at the bar and I said to one of them that I’d really like a dog and I really fancied an Afghan hound. But I was still at home with my dad and he wouldn’t let me have one. And she said, ‘Oh, we’ve got a teacher who comes up from London and she’s got two Afghan hounds! I’ll get her to come in and see you!’ A while later, this gorgeous, amazingly dressed lady came into the boutique one day and introduced herself. It was Pauline.” Smith invited Pauline to his 21st birthday party, and they stayed in touch. Lightning struck a little after as they were walking her luxuriously coated Afghans in a richly green field. “When we got back to my car she gave me a kiss. I hadn’t dared kiss her! Because I was quite proper and she was married with two kids. But she eventually left London and came to Nottingham, so I went aged 21 from living at home with my mum and dad to having two dogs, two cats and two kids! Everything that’s happened since, all of it, I owe to Pauline.”
SMOKING HOT
Paris, 1968
Smith understands the power and pull of Paris as a venue for showcasing fashion thanks to trips to the city nearly a decade earlier, when he was aged 21. “Pauline would take a few of her students at the Royal College of Art for the couture shows, and I went along. We saw shows by Cardin, Chanel, Courrèges, Balenciaga... and Yves Saint Laurent, the enfant terrible of fashion at the time. I remember at this show the audience gasped – really gasped – when one model unbuttoned the jacket of her Le Smoking to show she was wearing a transparent chiffon shirt underneath. As well as the socialites and the editors, there were often nuns in the audience back then – chaperoning convent girls in training to become petites mains – but it was not unseemly. Yves Saint Laurent understood understated elegance, and we appreciated that. Pauline ordered the last-ever Le Smoking made by Yves Saint Laurent couture – it was the same design we saw in that mind-blowing show.”
THE FIRST SHOW
Paris, 1977
Working by now as a designer of clothes, paying the bills with freelance work but developing his own label in cahoots with Pauline, Smith knows there is only one place to go: Paris. “In terms of establishing myself as a fashion designer, that was very important. It was in a friend’s apartment on Rue de Vaugirard, and from the start we had a diverse casting; we have always been loyal to that. And I think I was the only British designer showing in Paris then.” Smith rented a set of gold-painted, velvet-upholstered chairs for his show. On the big day, around 35 people rang the doorbell and trooped into that apartment to sit on them – there was only one row. The audience included buyers from Barneys, Neiman Marcus – Smith was capturing eyes he could never have hoped to attract from the other side of the English Channel. Of course, the show features the category that has been among his most defining: tailoring. From that show to this January’s, Smith’s eye for the evolution of silhouette has always been acutely sensitive to the subtle and always shifting gradations of tailoring’s lexicon. “I’ve got a very active mind and I’m very curious and very interested in my job. But then in parallel to that I’m interested in art, architecture, graphic design, product design... So when you’ve got that sort of busy, busy, busy head, I think you just know that the shoulder is becoming more relaxed or the shoulder is becoming stronger and more padded, or that you can get away with a wider trouser now.”
(Continues)
Read the full text by Luke Leitch and see all the illustrations by Javi Aznarez in the October issue of L'Uomo, on newsstands
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