Paul Smith refocuses on the basics to court millennials, and denies he only dresses the fashionable office rebel
Trousers for travelling, a suit built for bicycle commuting, a reflective rain jacket - Smith’s new collection for diffusion line PS, shown at Pitti Uomo in Florence, makes pragmatism seem a pleasure
If you work in an office where men wear nice suits, chances are you have at least one “Paul Smith Guy”.
This person fancies himself a bit of a rocker, the type who will agree to conform, but in the most riotously possible way. Paul Smith’s meticulously mischievous suits, socks, and other accessories offer gentlemen of this type quiet ways to be loud. The hallmark details are not merely whimsical, they’re gently subversive in their flashiness. The vibrant fine points that have become the hallmarks of a Paul Smith suit – the punchy contrast stitching at buttonholes, the off-colour buttons, the miles of psychedelically bright jacket lining – lend poetry to workdays largely written in legalese.
Paul Smith, 70 years old, loves to explain that, at the beginning of his career, he adopted the splashy minutiae as a marketing technique. “I wanted to sell clothes, and I had to give people a reason to buy them,” he told me this month in Florence, Italy, at the menswear trade show Pitti Uomo.
But the designer wants you to know that he is not here just to outfit the fashionable rebel in your office. “It would be incorrect of you to say that the suits are too gimmicky,” he says. Pointing to the many straightforward suits he produces for “the banking fraternity” of London, he argued that a cornerstone of his business is the basics: suits that are simply “well-made, good quality, simple cut, interesting fabric, easy to wear”.