Permanent Assistant. Visual Merchandiser and Showroom Assistant. See all jobs from Paul Smith. Sign up to emails from Vogue Business. By submitting your email, you agree to our privacy policy. You can unsubscribe at any time. Follow Us Twitter Instagram Facebook Youtube Pinterest. Site Search. Searching for What's On. Flexible visit date? They were all very creative and I enjoyed their company. I helped one student open her clothes shop, but I had nothing to do with the design.
I was 18 then, and my personal turning point was three years later when I met Pauline, a visiting lecturer from London who taught design at the Royal College of Art. We fell in love and she came to live with me in Nottingham, where I wanted to have a shop that sold unusual clothes for a provincial town.
In Pauline and I moved from Nottingham to her hometown, London. The clothes I was doing were quite classical, not attention seeking clothes, like Jean Paul Gaultier for instance, but slightly more unusual every day clothes, always with an unexpected surprise but still very wearable.
The first London shop opened in Covent Garden in It was minimalist in style, with a concrete floor and white walls, and attracted a creative demographic such as the young architects Norman Foster and Richard Rogers , and the advertising genius John Hegarty.
In I met a Japanese man who was based in Paris and looking for young design talent in Europe. The one he chose from the UK was me, and I signed an agreement to have a business in Japan. At that time international designers were all looking to expand to Japan, and so I took it very seriously and was very humbled and excited. But the other invited designers were too arrogant in my opinion.
I went four times in eight years, and slowly there was real press and public interest because I was embracing Japan and interested in their culture, history and food. It was very wearable. Japanese designers were designing extreme fashion, very wide trousers with a low crutch or oversized, kimono shapes.
They provided the more typical avant garde. Paul Smith products were modern but very wearable. They had colour and unusual lining, and that really appealed to them in Japan, as well as my regular visits and press interviews and being seen in magazines and on TV.
My shops are very popular in Hong Kong, which is more international, but in mainland China we do not do more than OK. There they like logos and luxury brands because their wealth is quite new money, so they like fashion which equals a symbol of their success. Paul Smith is more just nice clothes, not a status logo. Nowadays the average age is older and we celebrated our 50 th anniversary this year with customers of incredible loyalty, a more mature customer of 38 to 45 years old.
But we started selling online in , ahead of others, and a lot of people in their twenties buy from us online. We have a label called PS which definitely attracts the interest of millennials.
As well as our own shops we also have franchise shops, as well as a substantial wholesale business where we are very proud to sell to online companies like Mr Porter in the UK for example, and other big international customers.
We are a very unusual company. We are not reliant on handbag sales. In normal times it is our tailoring business: suits, jackets, trousers, and especially coats. Follow Us. Photo: Smith. Home News comment Guest Comment. Photo: SI. Interview How much influence does Italy have on fashion today?
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