I’VE ALWAYS FELT I WAS MADE FOR PAUL SMITH. Especially after that day 12 years ago when I made the purchase of a single sock from a pile at a flea market I had gone to with the kind of person you go to flea markets with. Something about the many thin stripes and their beautiful incoherence made me feel like I had earned them. Later, I realised they were Paul Smith. Also, that they… was an it. It was a single sock. Last month, an A/W showcase by the brand in Delhi made me feel the same kind of seen in my expression of the self. The English icon, who celebrated his 80th birthday and launched his memoir, Threads: My Life in Style, earlier this year, has always struck me as the tenderly singular force of individuality, of the kind we find painfully missing in the internet age. Of course, owning a Paul Smith piece is a matter and consequence of great privilege, so my admiration of his life and work has been more of a parasocial investment in his philosophy: a joyful manifestation of serendipity.
There was a period in my life when one of my aunts constantly taunted me for only wearing black. ‘Boys wear black,’ I’d tell her with an incredulous, isn’t-it-obvious shake of the head. Later, during my active wearing of linen shirts in soft colours like pink and mauve, I slowly found a resonance in what Paul Smith had done with bold colour, and the way he often concealed it within neutral canvases. You will see unpretentious colour pops he gives his motifs from the animal world; sticker graphic prints featured on his wallets and messenger bags and buttonholes done in different colours. But… you will also see the moleskin cotton jacket photoprinted in a big ivy-leaf pattern. Giving colour the canvas it needs is a classic Paul Smith move.
I’ve long prized my French Breton striped T-shirt from Marks & Spencer. Another from JW Anderson has been a no-nonsense base layer. But with the British designer’s iconic Signature Stripe, I came to understand that stripes can suggest evergreen youthfulness. The standard layout is composed of 40 specific, hand-mixed colours arranged in precise, varying widths, and coming face-to-face with them is always charming. Their permutations allow the designer to say anything with a code in the visual language he’s created, and that conveys a larger truth: know the elements or element family that works for you and develop your own visual code. Make your fit truly your own.
When I first got into appreciating tailoring, I would routinely walk past shops with ivory mannequin busts wearing half-stitched suit jackets. The criss-crossing basting on them was more interesting to me than anything else. More than the macabre romance of stitches and surgical needlecraft, it suggested the wildly dramatic inner architecture behind the jacket’s fall and structure. The exposed inside undid the rigid formality of the suit in all the ways that we now understand as fluid. I kept feeling weird about wanting to wear that construction site on the outside of my suit jacket until I saw a piece from the Paul Smith SS99 season: a pinstripe jacket featuring on the outside elements usually concealed inside. It emboldened me to tell people that I wanted to wear a pinstriped sports-polyester jacket modelled after a football jersey, numbered “8½” after the Federico Fellini film in the exact same filigreed lettering, with his last name underneath. I just hope I can find someone to design it for me, and for me to pay them well to do it.
Growing up a thickset guy took me closer to fabrics and textures that would flatten or restrain physique. That is how I came to own a mustard cotton-gabardine sweatshirt with a cowl-style collar bearing a thick zippered closure. I also own a utility-style canvas baseball jersey in a bright blueberry-blue that I’ve repeated to dullness. I like to own things I can go anywhere in, anytime. Which explains the three pairs of hiking sneakers that’ve gone from the boardroom to Bhutan. Observing Paul Smith’s deconstruction of formality has also affirmed my long-standing belief in personal style—more so, in style He’s always struck me as a tenderly singular force of individuality, the kind we find painfully missing today going beyond fashion choices. I’ve chosen all the trappings of the traveller’s guise for myself: stretch clothing, silhouettes that allow movement, fibres and textures that promote movement.
Often, a Paul Smith jacket will have a three-colour lining: on the flaps and the back. Or a magenta windowpane overcheck on a flannel jacket. Often, one element is all it takes: a simple digital watch where somebody expects a chronograph. For me, exercising my capacity for curiosity has often been through conversation-starting frames—a grey clubmaster to play down work environment sombreness, a thick square frame to convey an exaggerated artistic sensibility, a lean titanium frame in the type modern culture has deemed ‘slutty’. And the best part? Being intentional and well-edited in your personal style can carry you through the years. It becomes uniquely you—never old.
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