#TakenByPaul: Inside Paul Smith’s photography revolution
Words: Joseph Bullmore
Paul Smith’s office is full of beautiful rubbish. Up in the boardroom, a grand walnut table is slowing edging over to the back wall, as a great whirring mound of kitsch, tidbits and assorted trinkets creeps ever outward. The shelves on the wall overflow with colourful knick-knacks and handmade trinkets, while flashes of pastel and neon shapes vie for attention from a pile of garments on the oak floorboards.
The back wall is covered entirely by books, while down below the window sits an encyclopaedic collection of cassette tapes, vinyl records and CDs. If it wasn’t for Paul Smith sitting calmly and impeccably in the middle of it all, you’d think you had stumbled across the manic hoardings of some eccentric, wealthy, omnivorous lunatic. Perhaps, in a way, you would have – though there is some method in this madness.
‘I’ve got the vaguely round things over there,’ Paul says, nodding at a tumult of vintage ski helmets, signed footballs and decadent theatre masks. ‘Then there’s the toys and things over here,’ he says, leaning to his right and picking up an old wooden boat in peeling, dusty turquoise paint, embossed with the words: STATEN ISLAND FERRY. ‘Just think of the ideas you could get from that,’ his eyes flickering between the stacks and piles. If you want to know how the mind of Britain’s best-loved fashion designer works, start digging.
‘What I promote constantly to all the guys I work with is lateral thinking. Don’t go down the obvious route,’ he says. ‘In my case, I like being surrounded by unusual things.’ You get out what you put in, he says. And Paul has thrown everything in the Magimix at one point or another. ‘I’ll just reach over to a shelf and say “I mean like this”, and it could be something as obscure as an old Pink Floyd album cover, or a cycling jersey. I picked up a big pile of match boxes from Japan that we used in a meeting the other day about the design for a t-shirt.’
Finding the idea is easy when you are in Aladdin’s cave. ‘I’ve got quite a lot of mates that are writers, and they tell me about the fear of the blank page. They’ve told me how they go down to the local wine bar to have a couple of drinks and loosen their minds up a bit,’ Paul says. ‘That’s the easiest part for me. The hardest thing is actually harnessing the ideas – focusing them into a collection.’ It wasn’t always like this.
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