Paul Smith's gospel

It is late afternoon and, from a window seat at Julie's restaurant, W11, I can see a black Mini Cooper zipping round the corner of Clarendon Cross. It edges forward, lightly bumps the car in front, then reverses quickly.

The driver, at 6ft 4in, far too tall for this classic car, unfolds himself from within, like one of those old-fashioned rulers with hinges. How reassuring to know that Sir Paul Smith, Britain's most successful designer, not only drives himself, but uses the same parking technique as the rest of us.

He is 57, and has lived in this area for 28 years, arriving from Nottingham in 1976 with his partner Pauline Denyer, now his wife, and her two sons. 'My house was just down there,' he says, gesturing down Portland Road. 'It was very front-line back then. The locals used to get a bit pissed and would wander down the road going, "Yurr-eurgh." It was lively,' he adds with a grin.

If W11 property prices remained in the doldrums for a while, then that is only because Paul opened his first shop in Covent Garden. In 1979, that area boasted one fruit shop, two pubs and the Opera House. His arrival sparked a transformation.

'I'm famous for destroying areas and it's not something I'm particularly proud of,' he says ruefully. 'The Flatiron District, where I am in New York, was the middle of nowhere; now there's an Armani. In Tokyo, my first shop was on Antique Street. Now it's got Comme des Garçons and Kenzo. Floral Street was the same.'

Notting Hill had already risen when he opened his flagship Westbourne House store in 1998, but his arrival there prompted an influx of big brands. In November 2001 he opened his first shop in the City at the Royal Exchange.

It was designed as a men's shop, but he recently took over part of the space next door to sell the women's collection from the end of this month. Certainly the City is a notorious fashion wasteland, particularly for women, and we can only pray that he works a miracle here, too.

On paper, Paul Smith sounds like a global titan. In person, he remains a nice bloke from Nottingham, with flat Midlands vowels and a self-deprecating turn of phrase.

Yet he and Pauline own 85 per cent of a fashion empire with a £229 million turnover (the other 15 per cent is owned by the financial director, an old friend of theirs).

He has 14 shops in England, and will open another one later this year in a listed building in Nottingham - 'If we can ever please the heritage people,' he says drily. In Japan, he has 200 shops and sales are up, despite the recession.

In all, his menswear, womenswear, jeans, perfumes and the rest are sold in 35 countries from France to Taiwan. Yet he has almost no debt. No wonder so many fashion conglomerates want a piece of him. Three years ago, he hired a merchant bank to consider their offers, but rejected them all, hating the way that individual design gets lost in global branding: 'I loathe the impersonality of the corporate roll-out,' he says.

He also dislikes hype, and in 1992 he turned down the British Fashion Designer of the Year award on the grounds that it was 'self-congratulatory'. He did get sucked into Blair's Cool Britannia push when he joined a task force set up to promote design.

'It fell by the wayside when Chris Smith was moved out,' he says. 'To be honest, I was one of the few people who went to the meetings.' He is quick to point out that he had previously worked with Michael Heseltine. 'I'm not a political animal. I'll talk to whoever will listen.'

Unlike Alexander McQueen, John Galliano and Stella McCartney, who have all decamped to Paris, Paul Smith has been soldiering on at London Fashion Week. In a sea of aggressive young turks, Paul Smith is one of the few really big British names still showing here. (He first showed his womenswear in 1998, having launched it in 1994. His menswear has always been shown in Paris.)

Has he considered decamping, too? 'Yes, we had meetings about it again this week,' he says candidly. 'But the difficulty is that Milan and Paris have grown to ten-day events, so the slot you'd get would be midnight on the tenth day.'

So there he is amid young pretenders such as Boudicca, Alice Temperley and Robert Cary-Williams. He used to be a little critical about the way in which young British designers would no sooner have left college than they were hiring a PR and putting on a show, but his stance has softened.

'In some ways you can't criticise it because, when you look at the early shows of Galliano and McQueen, they were attention-seeking enough to get them fantastic jobs,' he concedes. 'It sends out a message to students: "If I want to get noticed I've got to do extremely eccentric things." It's very hard to advise what the middle ground would be.'

He doesn't mention Stella McCartney, so I raise the subject of her rather large losses last year. He is sympathetic.

'You're not really given enough time any more. People expect this instant success. In the case of Stella, it does take between three and five years to build a business. The Gucci formula is to put a lot of money into businesses to nurture them, but if you've got a shop on Brook Street, and one in the Meatpacking District, both designed in a really beautiful manner, it will cost a lot of money. I'm really cautious about opening shops and I'm really established.'

In contrast to Stella's gleaming emporia, Paul Smith's first shop was a 12ft-square space down a back alley in Nottingham, which he opened in 1970, aged 24. His original dream had been to race in the Tour de France, but when he was 17, he had an encounter with a car and ended up in hospital for six months.

After he emerged, he began hanging out at a pub frequented by art students and there, on his 21st birthday, he met Pauline Denyer, a lecturer in fashion. Pauline was a graduate of the Royal College of Art, and a married woman, a few years his senior, with two small sons. But what really blew him away was that she wore dark glasses, even indoors.

They swiftly moved in together. 'I was working as a shop assistant and living at home with my mum and dad, and suddenly it was two dogs, two kids and two cats.'

His father was in the rag trade, selling clothes to customers at home. Did Paul scandalise the neighbours? 'Oh, I think my parents were probably horrified to think that I was living in sin,' he admits.

'One day Pauline said, "You've got so many ideas, I'm sure you could have your own little shop or something.'' ' So he saved £600, and rented his tiny space, which he could only afford to open two days a week. 'Pauline's Afghan hound, Homer, was the manager,' he smiles.

'And the first thing that ever bore a Paul Smith label was made and designed by Pauline.' So why use his name? 'I'd worked at a shop called Birdcage for six years and - sorry if this sounds big-headed, but because of my personality I got to know the customers really well. So the name Paul Smith was known around Nottingham.'

Through choice, Pauline has always remained in the background; it wasn't until the mid-Eighties that she stopped taking an active role in the business and went to the Slade to study painting. Until recently, Pauline's son Jason, 43, worked in the business, but after 20 years he has gone to drama school, while Marcus, 40, writes music.

But without Pauline herself, Paul insists, his business would never have existed at all.

'She taught me everything I know but she also guided me. She kept the company very modest in terms of borrowing, and my head modest in terms of ego. She sacrificed her career for my career, which is something I can never really repay her for.'

They are rarely seen out together at parties and openings. 'Pauline's very shy and not interested in chit-chat,' he says. But he admits he used to get ticked off when fellow guests failed to acknowledge her.

'People would always say, "Hello Paul!" and then not have a conversation with Pauline or pretend they'd never met her before, and that was very annoying and disrespectful.'

Occasionally he will go out by himself, as he did recently when Helena Bonham Carter invited him to the premiere of Big Fish(the actress, her co-star Ewan McGregor and her director boyfriend Tim Burton are all customers).

But, as he points out, he has no need to network because both his career and his circle of friends are in perfectly good shape, thanks very much. 'And luckily, Pauline and I still love each other, which is great,' he laughs.

In November 2000, the same month he was knighted, they paid a quiet visit to the register office and got hitched. 'That was just a personal thing that Pauline wanted to do, and I wholeheartedly agreed to it. We'd never really talked about it before.'

Their lifestyle is extremely comfortable but not ostentatious. As well as their house in Holland Park, they own villas in Sardinia and Tuscany. Besides the Mini, he drives a 1956 Bristol, and his wife has a 14-year-old BMW.

As for clothes, he wears his own, of course: today he is dressed in a white T-shirt under a pink-andwhite striped shirt with differentcoloured buttons on the cuffs, a dark jacket and dark trousers. His hair is a little shaggy. The clothes are not wildly different from what he might have worn 20 years ago but somehow, they're completely of the moment.

That really is Paul Smith's secret. Though his design credo, 'classic with a twist', may now sound like a cliché, it is working as well now as it ever did. Nosing around his Notting Hill store, I found myself coveting a cashmere sweater with panels of colour, and a shirt in a gorgeous butterfly print.

Fashionistas occasionally snipe that his designs are 'safe', but how many of us want to wear anything dangerous? The subtle individuality and eccentricity of Paul Smith's designs are more beguiling than any strange new cut or frayed neckline.

'I do think I'm au fait with everything that's going on,' he says, but he cannot quite explain how. 'I don't know really,' he begins. 'I know Fran from Travis and other bands. I know young filmmakers, and I know more mature film-makers.'

Yet he is quite deliberately out of touch with much mainstream popular culture. 'I never go to other shops, I don't read magazines, I don't watch telly, I don't use the internet,' he says. 'I think one of the big dangers of the world today is we're so cluttered with information.'

Instead, he tries to keep his head clear. 'My hobby is thinking. I've got a curious mind and a very childlike approach. If you asked me something, I wouldn't go the obvious route to answer the question, I'd hop around the side.'

Both his office in Covent Garden and his home are filled with all kinds of clutter - toys, objects, old magazines - that he has collected. His autobiography is titled You Can Find Inspiration in Everything and subtitled And If You Can't, Look Again.

But his final piece of advice to fashion students has nothing to do with design. They should, he says, get a Saturday job selling clothes. 'If I'm in England, you'll always find me in the Notting Hill shop on a Saturday afternoon, just because I love it and I learn so much.'

Aren't people a little surprised to find the head of a multi-million-pound company advising them on which shirt to buy? 'Some are taken aback,' he concedes.

'But others just think I'm an old shop assistant.' He gives a short laugh and takes another sip of tea. How very English. How very Paul Smith.