“Green. Blue. Orange. The playfulness of pattern on pattern. Collage…” Paul Smith’s softly choppy East Midlands intonation played over the chirpy world music mix that soundtracked the runway, creating a sort of menswear flavored homage to The Orb’s Little Fluffy Clouds. Seated upon the crates in which the city’s mineral water delivery men transport their wares, we were in Smith’s Milan showroom, a former ball-bearing warehouse on Viale Umbria which he opened in 2003.
Despite long-standing business ties here, this was Smith’s first fashion show in Milan (whatever the Fashion Channel Fall 2004 menswear show caption says). He landed his runway here to present a finely rendered clothing canvas whose starting point was a book of color-tinted souvenir photographs of Egyptian landmarks. This he acquired in a street bazaar whilst holidaying with his wife Pauline around 25 years ago: “I bought it in Cairo before we went up the Nile in a felucca,” he elaborated.
That book, unearthed during a recent office declutter, sparked multiple motifs in the collection. The trinkets including metal shells, coins, and peace charms used to decorate roomy berets or in place of buttons on garments, drawn from the notion of market-acquired bric-a-brac that gains meaning through possession. The vibrant fish and flower print used on crepe shirting or intarsia in knits was created in colors drawn from the book. Of the cotton’s texture, Smith said: “This is a bit naff, but it’s about reflecting the surface of the water… It’s called the River Print because it’s taken from pictures of that trip.”
Travel, memories, phases of life: all of these universal themes were undercurrents—À la recherche du temps perdu and all that—but Smith, always more comedian than dramatist, laid nothing on too thick. The fictional “Paul Smith hotel” tortoiseshell key fobs worn attached to belt loops and the multiple mock-croc baggage labels tagged to man bags were shoppable allusions to transience and exploration.
Flared-leg shorts and flap pocketed shirting or pullover smocks in springily compact silky crepe were worn north of mid-calf socks and low profile racing driver sneakers (or squishable loafers) in neutral colorways shot through with the occasional zesty intervention. There was a lovely riff on Smith’s stripes in knit twinset: Missoni without the angles, but also very identifiably this designer.
Suiting fabrics included 280 gram woolen mohairs and silk-shot linens that Smith said he had pushed to have an unorthodox feel, given the current ubiquity of the fabric. A brown suede jacket, luxury Withnail and I, was amongst the many memorable outerwear landmarks on this tour of Smith’s season. Of that chirpy soundtrack, Smith said, “it’s about the contradiction of putting things together in an unusual way.”