Paul Smith uses dad’s photography to inspire Paris fashion week show

Paul Smith regularly takes inspiration from his travels but for his latest collection, shown in Paris on Wednesday afternoon, he stuck a little closer to home.

The amateur photography collection of his dad, Harold B Smith, served as his starting point. Guests entered the venue through a mocked-up dark room complete with buckets of emulsion, strung-up negatives and a stainless steel sink. A booklet featuring some of the work of Smith senior, a founding member of the Beeston camera club in Nottinghamshire, was left on each seat.

Rather than a standard catwalk show, models came out in groups of three as Smith talked through each look. This intimate approach contrasted sharply with the gargantuan spectacles that have become luxury fashion’s standard. At Smith’s gathering, the guest list hovered around the 200 mark. At Louis Vuitton the night before, there were close to 2,000.

“We’re not one of the big groups, so what can you do,” he mused backstage when asked about his approach. “The asset is a human being who can chat about things.”

And chat he did. Smith may be only a couple of years off his 80th birthday but he is showing no signs of switching to the slow lane. Instead, he leapt about, enthusing over fabrics, cuts, the line on a glove, the height of a shoe and his father’s messy doodles that he used as prints across knitwear and tailoring.

At one stage, he pulled a mooing toy cow out of a bag. At another, a plastic egg out of a shoe – his signature glorious, grey bouffant adding to the mad professor vibe. This was British eccentricity at its finest, only heightened by some slightly confused French editors who remained poker-faced throughout.

Smith mentioned that his father was an observant man, often capturing “little moments that other people would have missed”. This gene seems to have been passed down to Smith junior.

He’s a stickler for detail, even on those elements that cannot be seen. Corduroy trousers were printed on the inside to give a vintage effect, while the linings of jackets featured blown-up prints from his father’s negatives. Ties and shirts were designed in matching fabrics, a trick he picked up from his friend, the photographer David Bailey, who originally learned the technique from his stint in the Royal Air Force.

While these were clothes designed for a modern man, Smith used traditional techniques and fabrics to ensure they stand the test of time. Some trousers were made from thornproof tweed, originally designed for hunters to withstand brambles. An upcoming collaboration with Barbour includes a playful twist on its signature parkas, while detachable hoods can be mixed and matched.

He also dived into his own archive. Clingy knitted jumpers in satsuma orange and plum stemmed from the form-fitting jumpers he used to dress clients including David Bowie in during the 70s. Back then, he couldn’t afford to make them, so instead used to buy jumpers from the schoolboy section in his local department store.

While the mood in the room was buoyant, it’s been a challenging time for the brand, between Brexit, Covid, the war in Ukraine (Smith shuttered his Russian stores in 2023) and the loss of tax-free shopping for tourists. It has suffered five straight years of losses, with latest figures showing a pre-tax loss of £5.3m for the 12 months to 30 June 2024, compared with a loss of £2.3m in the year prior.