Paul Smith: How rubber chickens and stripes built a fashion empire

Sir Paul Smith sits in his London office surrounded by the accumulated debris of five decades—plastic poultry, clockwork toys, nativity scenes fashioned from nuts, and a bicycle that once carried Chris Froome across the finish line of the Tour de France. He reaches into his bag and produces two large rubber chickens, squeezing them until they squeak. This, he explains with the certainty of someone who has lived the story a thousand times, is how he built an empire in Japan.

When Smith first arrived in Tokyo in 1982, language was a wall. One person in the room spoke schoolboy English. The rest communicated through gesture, through drawings, and through humor—the rubber chickens emerging from his bag at four o'clock when the afternoon energy flagged, collapsing everyone into laughter. Nearly forty-five years later, there are more than twenty Paul Smith stores across Japan, part of a global operation that spans fifty countries. The chickens worked.

Smith invited BBC News to spend an afternoon at his headquarters to discuss his new autobiography, Threads: My Life in Style, published this month as he turns eighty. The book arrives at a moment of reflection, a chance to pass on what he has learned to students who arrive convinced they need a fashion show, two shops, and a million pounds before they can begin. Smith's actual beginning was far smaller. In 1970, he opened a tiny, windowless store in Nottingham. On the first day, he took thirty-eight pounds—most of it from his wife, who bought pieces simply to encourage him.

The path to fashion was not his original plan. At seventeen, a cycling crash ended his ambitions to become a professional cyclist. He turned instead to design, to tailoring, to the particular alchemy of color and cut that would eventually define his name. The signature stripes that have sustained his business for thirty-five years first appeared in his spring 1992 collection. Customer demand brought them back again and again. "Eventually you think, oh, how many more combinations of a stripe can I do?" he says. But so far, the answer has been: many more.

Smith's success rests on something he returns to repeatedly: good manners and patience. Every morning, after his five-thirty swim, he writes thank-you postcards to everyone who has sent him a gift and included an address. For forty-five years, a fan in America has been sending him curious objects—always without a box, always without a message. He writes back anyway. "Good manners is really important in business, especially for longevity," he reflects. This is not sentiment. This is the operating principle of someone who has watched his company endure through decades of fashion's violent cycles.

The autobiography does not shy from the texture of his life. George Best, the footballer, used to hide in Smith's spare bedroom when the pressure of being Manchester United's first superstar became unbearable. They met in the early seventies when Best was designing children's clothes. Smith knew nothing about football, which made him precisely the person Best needed—someone who would not treat him as a celebrity, who would simply order fish and chips and listen. David Bowie called him Smithy and asked endless questions about everything he saw. When Bowie's final album, Black Star, was released, Smith designed the accompanying T-shirt. "I had a hint he was ill because he was in Switzerland a lot," Smith says quietly.

There is an irony embedded in Smith's story. In 1992, on Desert Island Discs, he told presenter Sue Lawley that he was not a reader at all—his mind leaped around too much to hold a book. He chose the 1974 Beano Annual for its sixteen pages of Roger the Dodger. He is dyslexic, undiagnosed throughout his school years. "It hasn't impacted me at all. I just can't read very well," he explains. When he gives talks, which he does frequently, he speaks from memory and hopes it sounds right. Yet here he is, at eighty, having written a book.

At the end of the afternoon, as Smith walks through Covent Garden toward his flagship store on Floral Street—where he still works the floor for a few hours each week—he carries a gift under his arm: a copy of the 1974 Beano Annual, the book he chose on Desert Island Discs more than thirty years ago. "I haven't got it," he beams. "I mean that's class. Brilliant." A fashion icon, known globally for stripes and tailoring and the particular British sensibility he has spent half a century refining, walking through London with a comic annual tucked under his arm. It is, in its way, the perfect image of the man—someone who has never forgotten that humor, curiosity, and good manners are not obstacles to success. They are the foundation of it.