A typical day for me starts at about 6.30am. I travel about seven months of the year, but I usually go swimming no matter where I am in the world, either at my hotel or at one of a couple of places I'm a member of in London. After that, if I'm in London, I normally go for my breakfast in Soho at the same place - I'm a creature of habit.
I get to work at eightish because there are only a couple of hours in the day when we're not trading somewhere - Japan or Los Angeles, for example - so there's always stuff coming in. I enjoy going in to work early because it's when I get a bit of peace and quiet to collect my thoughts. I always wear my own clothes - they're free. I just go into one of the shops and say, 'I think I'll have that shirt'.
I'm the chief designer of Paul Smith, but I'm also the chairman, so it's often 'double-hat day'. I try to package them into mornings and afternoons so my head's not all over the place, but it never seems to happen. I have 20 assistant designers and I basically come up with all the ideas, then they help me develop them, so we have regular meetings, especially at the beginning of a new collection. I do 13 collections twice a year and four fashion shows, so it's a bit of a conveyer belt; you can't really get off - as soon as you finish one, you're starting the next one.
I think if you can keep your mind free of what other people are doing, then you have a chance to come up with something original, so I don't look at other brands and I'm not a big magazine reader. There's so much out there: you could look in a book or you could go to India and see the way people put colours together there. I also find ideas in street markets, interesting old books or antique clothes. I always rework the things I find. Britishness is still a big influence. I like to take existing traditions and add a certain quirkiness.
Although I didn't always identify with them, I liked all the self-expression periods - like punks, mods, new romantics - because that's young people expressing themselves through wanting to be different and it's better than terrorism or rioting. I don't like the modern way of brand-domination, with all the shops looking the same in every major city. I think that's really boring and disappointing. Wherever you go, the shops look the same and it's hard to find a nice, individually owned shop. It's hard to know where in the world you are any more. Greed is the name of the game, unfortunately. But I'm always the one who's up at 6am looking for a hardware store or a fishmongers or something obscure.
As spokesman for the company, I also do a lot of interviews. I'm a bit too hands on; I'm involved in everything, which is delightful and unusual in today's world. I absolutely love it but, obviously, as you get more responsibilities, you have to work longer hours and you're not always sure whether you're being as good as you could be on every subject. So over the past five years I've tried to delegate, which I think is always a difficult thing for a self-made man.
