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He’s reinvented classics to solve modern-day problems for the modern-day wearer.

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What successful, multimillionaire designer still works the shop floor, and still attends the fabric fairs?

A curious type, Paul Smith has always been one for human interaction, and observation. That’s where he gets much of his inspiration. It’s why he works on the shop floor of his Albemarle Street store on a Saturday and why he still packs his bags and heads to France and Italy for the seasonal fabric fairs.

At the start of his career, he recalls traveling to County Donegal on the Atlantic coast of Northern Ireland. A young son had taken over the family fabric mill there, and he was willing to work in a different way for Smith.

“I went to visit the mill, which was in a Methodist church on a beach in Donegal, in a place called Downings. The phone number was ‘Downings, 3-2’ and when you rang it, it went through to a telephone exchange in somebody’s house. It was hilarious. And cows used to wander in on the beach into the mill,” recalled Smith.

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Despite its humble situation, that mill delivered, and then some.

“I took things like a Donegal tweed, and later a Harris Tweed, that traditionally would have come in geography teacher colors like rust. I wanted them in lilac, dusty pink or lemon. The young man at the mill would make a tweed with lemon in it — or lilac. Eventually he did a tweed — in silk,” Smith added.

That passion for pushing limits, experimenting, investigating — and challenging traditional notions of clothing and textile making — has never dimmed. He discovered digital printing at a fabric fair, which led him to create his famous spaghetti print shirt, and scores of other items adorned with his and others’ photos.

“A lot of the ways I’ve created and developed things have been learnt by being a traveler, a cyclist and having worked at a mill in Yorkshire called Leigh Mills,” he said in his Covent Garden headquarters, where he’s surrounded by mounds of cycling jerseys.

“I get loads of cycling jerseys sent to me from around the world. Things like zip-tops and stripes have been influenced by my collection of cycling jerseys — and they’re very popular with the more unstructured suit,” he said, pointing to one of his most innovative products, A Suit to Travel In.

To date, the style has sold around 50,000 units, and was born from Smith’s desire to crisscross the world in a suit that wouldn’t crease, and that would be comfortable to move around in.

“One of the mills we work with actually does a line of fabrics for schoolchildren’s uniforms, which are ma de out of nasty stuff. The principle of nasty stuff is that it’s robust and doesn’t crease because they really mistreat their clothes,” Smith said.

By a nontraditional approach, the designer was able to create a lightweight, wrinkle-free travel suit, out of wool (not nasty stuff).

At the launch of the collection, the Olympic medal-winning gymnast Max Whitlock, who won a bronze in the pommel horse final at the 2012 London Olympics, put the suit through its paces in an energetic performance.

“If [the suit] can cope with what I do to it, it’s the perfect thing for men who travel a lot,” he said. There were also circus performers at the show who had the crowd in a thrall with their gravity-defying antics.

The collection uses high-twist, 100 percent wool yarn and quick-recovery, crease-resistant cloth that also has water-repellent qualities. Smith’s most recent testimonial was the cellist Sheku Kanneh- Ma son.

The travel suit has spawned no less than two iterations — an entirely ma chine washable suit, and a travel jacket  ma de from knitted jersey, which has hidden zips for travel necessities.

“It’s all to do with the lack of interlining, or if you use interlining, it has to be compatible with the actual fabric,” Smith explained of his ma chine washable suit.

A Suit to Travel In was the latest in a long line of innovations aimed at making day-to-day life easier for customers.

When he first started designing his own collections he asked himself: “How can I ma ke something that people would want to buy? How do you ma ke a white shirt different than the  Ma rks & Spencer’s white shirt?” he said.

That first white shirt was oversize with deep armholes, a smaller collar with a soft interlining, real mother of pearl buttons, and 22 stitches to the inch.

His first collection, which he showed from his microscopic hotel room in Paris, having sent handwritten invitations to buyers, featured oversize checked shirts with a small collar and a contrasting pattern to the front.

Smith was also talented at working around limitations: His early knits were skinny, not because he wanted to be cutting-edge, but because he had no choice.

“I had to persuade the factory to work for us, and they absolutely refused to do anything other than kid’s school sweaters, so I thought, ‘OK, I’ll ma ke a trend for skinny sweaters.’ So if you look at pictures of David Bowie, Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton in a skinny sweater, those were all mine because, at the time, I couldn’t ma ke anything normal-sized,” he said.

Smith was also one of the first designers to soften the suit. In the late Seventies and early Eighties, he was working as a freelance designer for The International Wool Secretariat, and “we got asked if there was something we could do to get young people in suits. So we just softened the construction of the suit and selected fabrics that wouldn’t have traditionally been used, like crepe fabrics and other lightweight fabrics,” he said.

He is now channeling his efforts into creating sustainable designs, with the brand recently creating a coat ma de out of recycled plastic water bottles.

“The ma in thing about sustainability is you can’t crack it completely, you just do your best. We have a new [shoe style]  ma de from natural rubber because I was trying to work out how to  ma ke a shoe you can put on, and get it immediately comfortable. It’s a shoe to travel in,” Smith said, taking off his own shoe and folding it in half to demonstrate.

It’s a classic-looking brogue, but without the pain of breaking the shoe in. “It was always classic with a twist from the beginning,” the designer said.

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Showcasing a distinctly British vibe, the Paul Smith collection illustrates the designer's immaculate tailoring skills, faultless construction and brilliant eye for detail. Each considered piece fuses heritage craftsmanship with a distinctive, alternative edge.

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ADVERTORIAL • November 2023

Have suit. Will travel.

Cl assic, inventive, iconic – Paul Smith’s A Suit to Travel In will effortlessly elevate your in-flight style. Who knew practicality and comfort could look this good? Think of it as the perfect travel companion: poised, pulled-together and always ready for take-off…

Flight? What flight? Wrinkles and crumples are a thing of the past thanks to this suit’s crease-resistance fabric. The secret lies in the innovative quick-recovery, high-twist yarn, which reduces wrinkling and withstands creases – even after several hours at 36,000 feet – whether on your person or in your suitcase. You – and your suit – will arrive looking as immaculate as you did upon departure. 

When style and comfort meet

You wouldn’t usually associate the words ‘drawstring waist’ with sleek style but, in the hands of Paul Smith, it’s no longer an oxymoron. A Suit to Travel In trousers are designed with a low-rise, drawstring waist and a slightly relaxed fit through the thigh for extra comfort during long flights. Or, indeed, lengthy meetings.

It has some smart admirers

Effortlessly debonair, instinctively stylish and a modern icon is a description that can be applied not only to Sir Paul Smith and his tailoring, but to British actor Matt Smith. Former Doctor Who, Prince Philip in The Crown – and now the face of Paul Smith . Matt knows all about being a frequent flyer – and has the perfect suit for this role. True British classics, all round. To see Matt Smith in action, click here .

It survived the gymnast test

The suit has been rigorously tested, but perhaps not in the way you might anticipate. When it was launched in 2015, Olympic-gold-medal-winning gymnast Matt Whitlock took it for a spin. This suit twisted, turned, and tumbled on the pommel horse – and passed with flying colours. There wasn’t a crease or a wrinkle in sight. It’s also been taken for a run, courtesy of champion freerunner Timothy Shieff and emerged unscathed from an encounter with yoga instructor Shona Vertue.

Pockets of delight

When travelling, you need the essentials within reach: phone, wallet, ticket, passport. Nobody wants to be the person scrabbling for their travel documents at the check-in desk. Which is why this made-for-travelling suit has been designed with multiple, discreet pockets: flattering angled pockets at the front; buttoned pockets at the back. Clever stuff.

Destination: anywhere

Whatever the weather at your destination, Paul Smith has the tailoring to suit (pun unintended but accurate). A Suit to Travel is available in tailored or slim fits and different colours and fabric weights. And for the ultimate in flexibility – because you make the sartorial rules, not your clothes – the suit is available to purchase as both a two-piece and as separates. So you can mix and match them at will, and they’ll integrate seamlessly into your wardrobe.

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Le Corbusier’s triumphant return to Moscow

The exhibition of French prominent architect Le Corbusier, held in The Pushkin Museum, brings together the different facets of his talent. Source: ITAR-TASS / Stanislav Krasilnikov

The largest Le Corbusier exhibition in a quarter of a century celebrates the modernist architect’s life and his connection with the city.

Given his affinity with Moscow, it is perhaps surprising that the city had never hosted a major examination of Le Corbusier’s work until now. However, the Pushkin Museum and the Le Corbusier Fund have redressed that discrepancy with the comprehensive exhibition “Secrets of Creation: Between Art and Architecture,” which runs until November 18.

Presenting over 400 exhibits, the exhibition charts Le Corbusier’s development from the young man eagerly sketching buildings on a trip around Europe, to his later years as a prolific and influential architect.

The exhibition brings together the different facets of his talent, showing his publications, artwork and furniture design alongside photographs, models and blueprints of his buildings.

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Irina Antonova, director of the Pushkin Museum, said, “It was important for us to also exhibit his art. People know Le Corbusier the architect, but what is less well know is that he was also an artist. Seeing his art and architecture together gives us an insight into his mind and his thought-processes.”

What becomes obvious to visitors of the exhibition is that Le Corbusier was a man driven by a single-minded vision of how form and lines should interact, a vision he was able to express across multiple genres.

The upper wings of the Pushkin Museum are separated by the central stairs and two long balconies. The organizers have exploited this space, allowing comparison of Le Corbusier’s different art forms. On one side there are large paintings in the Purist style he adapted from Cubism, while on the other wall there are panoramic photographs of his famous buildings.

Le Corbusier was a theorist, producing many pamphlets and manifestos which outlined his view that rigorous urban planning could make society more productive and raise the average standard of living.

It was his affinity with constructivism, and its accompanying vision of the way architecture could shape society, which drew him to visit the Soviet Union, where, as he saw it, there existed a “nation that is being organized in accordance with its new spirit.”

The exhibition’s curator Jean-Louis Cohen explains that Le Corbusier saw Moscow as “somewhere he could experiment.” Indeed, when the architect was commissioned to construct the famous Tsentrosoyuz Building, he responded by producing a plan for the entire city, based on his concept of geometric symmetry.

Falling foul of the political climate

He had misread the Soviet appetite for experimentation, and as Cohen relates in his book Le Corbusier, 1887-1965, drew stinging attacks from the likes of El Lissitsky, who called his design “a city on paper, extraneous to living nature, located in a desert through which not even a river must be allowed to pass (since a curve would contradict the style).”

Not to be deterred, Le Corbusier returned to Moscow in 1932 and entered the famous Palace of the Soviets competition, a skyscraper that was planned to be the tallest building in the world.

This time he fell foul of the changing political climate, as Stalin’s growing suspicion of the avant-garde led to the endorsement of neo-classical designs for the construction, which was ultimately never built due to the Second World War.

Situated opposite the proposed site for the Palace of the Soviets, the exhibition offers a tantalizing vision of what might have been, presenting scale models alongside Le Corbusier’s plans, and generating the feeling of an un-built masterpiece.

Despite Le Corbusier’s fluctuating fortunes in Soviet society, there was one architect who never wavered in his support . Constructivist luminary Alexander Vesnin declared that the Tsentrosoyuz building was the "the best building to arise in Moscow for over a century.”

The exhibition sheds light on their professional and personal relationship, showing sketches and letters they exchanged. In a radical break from the abstract nature of most of Le Corbusier’s art, this corner of the exhibition highlights the sometimes volatile architect’s softer side, as shown through nude sketches and classical still-life paintings he sent to Vesnin.

“He was a complex person” says Cohen. “It’s important to show his difficult elements; his connections with the USSR, with Mussolini. Now that relations between Russia and the West have improved, we can examine this. At the moment there is a new season in Le Corbusier interpretation.” To this end, the exhibition includes articles that have never previously been published in Russia, as well as Le Corbusier’s own literature.

Completing Le Corbusier’s triumphant return to Russia is a preview of a forthcoming statue, to be erected outside the Tsentrosoyuz building. Even if she couldn’t quite accept his vision of a planned city, Moscow is certainly welcoming him back.

All rights reserved by Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

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