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10 Fashion ‘When I was 11 my dad bought me this camera’, recalls the fashion designer Paul Smith in a short film entitled Postcards from London, directed by Jim Pilling and released as part of the promos for Smith’s SS 2019 collection. As he talks Smith holds the camera in question – a classic Kodak 35mm Retinette – in seemingly pristine condition. Harold Smith, his father, was a credit draper in Nottingham, selling clothes from his home ‘on tick’, but he was also a keen photographer. Harold had been a founder member of the Camera Club in Beeston, a suburb just south of the city where the family lived. Although Harold worked in what was once called the rag-trade, and Smith when he left school at fifteen went to work in a clothing warehouse, both found in photography a means of creative expression. Smith says he wanted to become a professional cyclist, but his dream ended when aged eighteen he had a serious accident which left him in hospital for three months. As he recovered and an interest in art was rekindled, his attention largely turned to fashion. He opened his own shop in Nottingham in 1970 and learnt to make up his own designs with the help of his girlfriend (and later wife) Pauline Denyer, who had studied fashion at the Royal College of Art. Photography, however, was never far from his mind. Today Smith may be internationally recognised for his casual clothes in simple but superior fabrics with a relaxed yet sharp tailoring, a style that is as accessible as it is affordable, but throughout his long and distinguished career he has sustained a serious interest in photography. The quality and restraint of finish in everything from the overall cut to the decorative details of his clothes have marked him out as a sort of British Armani, who simultaneously rejoices in flourishes of eccentric embellishment – stripes, poker-dots, florals. Known for starting the craze for the Filofax as well as the reintroduction of boxer shorts to the British male’s wardrobe, and let’s not forget those signature socks, Paul Smith is now a global phenomenon with a network of over 300 shops on six continents. Smith, however, is unusual in that he has never sold out and his company remains independent and separate from the cartel of conglomerates who dominate the fashion industry (LVMH; Richemont; Kering) and who have monetised fashion and transformed many historic small companies and artisanal enterprises into globalised luxury brands. Since starting out Smith has worked with many major, as well as up-and-coming, photographers including David Bailey, Julian Broad, Hugh Hales-Tooke, Sandro Sodano, Mario Testino, Anton Corbijn and Viviane Sassen. He has also photographed many of his own Column paul smith Paul Smith SS 2021 Spaghetti Shirt advertising campaigns and editorials for fashion magazines. He says, ‘I have a camera with me at all times. I am always taking photographs wherever I am in the world – it’s my visual diary’. In the ‘BBC Get Creative at Home Masterclass’ he gave during the first lockdown in 2020, Smith talked of how he has taken ‘inspiration from photography’ in not only his approach to aesthetics but also to design as a process. He explains how he first learnt to construct images by using the viewfinder of his Retinette camera. ‘By looking through’ the narrow lens, he explains, ‘you have a very restricted view and I think that my way, which is to do with looking and seeing, came from this camera’. Working with film was also critical in helping get the shot perfect as ‘you won’t see it until it is developed’. Smith’s artistic eye is distinctive. The sharp silhouettes of his tailoring have remained a touchstone and although he adheres to a regime of recognisable modernist visuals, he frequently adds surreal and subversive touches to his clothes – often in the form of images taken directly from his own photographs. Bold abstract patterns and primary colours may be used to off-set more formal and austere
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11 Paul Smith SS 2021 Leica camera Paul Smith SS 2019 Parachutist coat aspects of a design. Such wit and whimsy, Smith says, are inherited from his father and it is a pictorial language that runs through their shared love of photography. When Harold died in 1998, Smith inherited his 1958 Rolleiflex camera as well as his surviving photographs. Some of these were published by Violette Editions, alongside a selection of Smith’s own photographs, as Father & Son: Harold and Paul Smith in 2000. Although commonplace today, Smith was one of the first designers to print photographs onto fabric. He says the idea came to him in Italy in the 1980s after seeing an image of Florence’s Duomo printed onto the side of a van, prompting Smith to consider – ‘why can’t I put photographs onto clothes?’ Using his own photographs of everyday things – apples, acorns, leaves, flowers, clouds, budgies, kittens and jellyfish – Smith has employed photographically printed fabrics, to great effect, on a whole host of garments. It is a technique that has become as synonymous with his style as much as his timeless tailoring. He says, ‘printing the unexpected onto a fabric’ has become a sort of ‘handwriting’. One fabric he has used in several collections is an image of a plate of Day-Glo spaghetti, inspired by Smith’s discovery in Japan of a shop that sold wax food for display in restaurant windows to entice passers-by. It has featured in several campaigns on shirts and scarfs and this season on an iPhone cover. In his SS 2019 collection, Smith turned to his own, as well as his father’s, photographic archive to produce a range of fabrics that reference what he calls his father’s ‘tabletop photography’ that remains such an enduring influence. Recalling his father’s joy in putting two negatives together, ‘it was all pre-computer, he was very avantgarde’, Smith took one of his own photographs, a shot of Palm Springs, and another by his father, of a parachutist at an air-show, and created an iridescent fabric in orange reds, golds and black used memorably on a long coat. Such juxtapositions, especially of the older transparen- — Joseph McBrinn joseph mcbrin through the viewfinder cies with their graininess and washed-out colours, have produced dazzling composite effects. In 2012, in an interview for the Telegraph, Smith was asked to list ten of his favourite books. Aside from fiction and memoirs, by writers and performers from Hanif Kureishi to Patti Smith, and biographies of artists and designers, such as Henri Matisse, Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent, the list was comprised of a diverse range of books on photography. These included Miroslav Tichý’s Women of Kyjov (2008), Watabe Yukichi’s 1950s photographic essay in noir, A Criminal Investigation (2011), and Alexander Liberman’s classic The Art and Technique of Color Photography (1951), with its glamorous, technicolour coverage of the pioneering fashion photography of Cecil Beaton, Erwin Blumenfeld, Horst P. Horst, Andre Kertesz, Norman Parkinson, Irving Penn and John Rawlings, as well as The Wonderful World of Albert Kahn: Colour Photographs from a Lost Age by David Okuefuna (2008) and John Pawson’s A Visual Inventory (2012). Aside from his love of photography books, Smith is also a collector of photography and has curated exhibitions – most recently the J.H. Lartigue…c’est chic! at the Michael Hoppen Gallery. He readily admits to being influenced by the strategic ways in which certain artists, such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Hamilton, have used photography in their work. He has also collaborated with photographers such as his contemporary Martin Parr. Smith’s collaborations are as diverse as his inspirations. For his SS 2021 collection Smith designed for Leica a limited-edition digital camera. Aside from Father & Son, Paul Smith’s photography has appeared as central in several books dedicated to his work including Paul Smith: A-Z (2012) an alphabetical compendium of visuals, Hello My Name is Paul Smith (2013) the catalogue that accompanied a major exhibition at London’s Design Museum, Paul Smith’s Cycling Scrapbook (2016), a volume dedicated to his love of bikes, and Paul Smith (2020), a monograph or ‘a portrait through 50 objects’ that opens with his Kodak Retinette. A major exhibition of Paul Smith’s photography is long overdue but to get a sense of his brilliant eye I recommend his Instagram (his own account as distinct from his company’s) which has some 370k followers.

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Fashion

‘When I was 11 my dad bought me this camera’, recalls the fashion designer Paul Smith in a short film entitled Postcards from London, directed by Jim Pilling and released as part of the promos for Smith’s SS 2019 collection. As he talks Smith holds the camera in question – a classic Kodak 35mm Retinette – in seemingly pristine condition. Harold Smith, his father, was a credit draper in Nottingham, selling clothes from his home ‘on tick’, but he was also a keen photographer. Harold had been a founder member of the Camera Club in Beeston, a suburb just south of the city where the family lived. Although Harold worked in what was once called the rag-trade, and Smith when he left school at fifteen went to work in a clothing warehouse, both found in photography a means of creative expression. Smith says he wanted to become a professional cyclist, but his dream ended when aged eighteen he had a serious accident which left him in hospital for three months. As he recovered and an interest in art was rekindled, his attention largely turned to fashion. He opened his own shop in Nottingham in 1970 and learnt to make up his own designs with the help of his girlfriend (and later wife) Pauline Denyer, who had studied fashion at the Royal College of Art. Photography, however, was never far from his mind. Today Smith may be internationally recognised for his casual clothes in simple but superior fabrics with a relaxed yet sharp tailoring, a style that is as accessible as it is affordable, but throughout his long and distinguished career he has sustained a serious interest in photography. The quality and restraint of finish in everything from the overall cut to the decorative details of his clothes have marked him out as a sort of British Armani, who simultaneously rejoices in flourishes of eccentric embellishment – stripes, poker-dots, florals. Known for starting the craze for the Filofax as well as the reintroduction of boxer shorts to the British male’s wardrobe, and let’s not forget those signature socks, Paul Smith is now a global phenomenon with a network of over 300 shops on six continents. Smith, however, is unusual in that he has never sold out and his company remains independent and separate from the cartel of conglomerates who dominate the fashion industry (LVMH; Richemont; Kering) and who have monetised fashion and transformed many historic small companies and artisanal enterprises into globalised luxury brands. Since starting out Smith has worked with many major, as well as up-and-coming, photographers including David Bailey, Julian Broad, Hugh Hales-Tooke, Sandro Sodano, Mario Testino, Anton Corbijn and Viviane Sassen. He has also photographed many of his own

Column paul smith

Paul Smith SS 2021 Spaghetti Shirt advertising campaigns and editorials for fashion magazines. He says, ‘I have a camera with me at all times. I am always taking photographs wherever I am in the world – it’s my visual diary’. In the ‘BBC Get Creative at Home Masterclass’ he gave during the first lockdown in 2020, Smith talked of how he has taken ‘inspiration from photography’ in not only his approach to aesthetics but also to design as a process. He explains how he first learnt to construct images by using the viewfinder of his Retinette camera. ‘By looking through’ the narrow lens, he explains, ‘you have a very restricted view and I think that my way, which is to do with looking and seeing, came from this camera’. Working with film was also critical in helping get the shot perfect as ‘you won’t see it until it is developed’. Smith’s artistic eye is distinctive. The sharp silhouettes of his tailoring have remained a touchstone and although he adheres to a regime of recognisable modernist visuals, he frequently adds surreal and subversive touches to his clothes – often in the form of images taken directly from his own photographs. Bold abstract patterns and primary colours may be used to off-set more formal and austere

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