Legendary designer Paul Smith on drugs, David Bowie and earning his stripes

Bowie’s death has clearly affected Smith. ‘He was somebody that I knew quite well. He’d asked me to do the T-shirts to go with Blackstar, which was launched on 8 January. I got a call in November, asking if I could do a T-shirt of a black star to be launched a minute after midnight on the 8th, which we did. Sadly, on the 10th he died. It was a day I was doing London Collections Men, so I was on show and trying to be brave and strong but like many people was incredibly sad.’

Smith’s association with music has lasted throughout his career. He was making trousers for Jimmy Page at 18. ‘He had a 24in waist, you know? There were rumours that, by the 1990s, some of the Floral Street staff were selling quality ‘e’s to Saturday afternoon ravers. ‘Oh, almost certainly,’ he says, laughing. His high-street imitators are legion and can feel a little like the menswear Danny Dyers to his Michael Caine. ‘I find them really disappointing,’ he says, attempting a modicum of professional diplomacy.

Smith was an early advocate of the commercial potential of British fashion. During the 1980s he was hounded off Yorkshire TV by a trade union rep and mill owner for suggesting the problem with mill closures was not cheap imports but the unwillingness of our factories to produce design-led clothing. In the 1980s, he wangled a visit to Downing Street, with the intention of making the Thatcher administration take design and its commercial possibilities seriously. ‘Somehow I managed to get myself to Downing Street, to Thatcher.’ Was she receptive? ‘She was but she put me on to Heseltine, who was very flippant about it all. But I just kept bashing away. With Blair. With Major. And now with Cameron.’

How times change. Now Samantha Cameron is a trusted customer of Smith’s womenswear. (Smith claims not to hold any ideological allegiance: ‘I’m nothing because I can always see both sides.’) Included among the many visitors he has received in The Quiet Room are Grayson Perry, Colin Firth, Gary Oldman and Apple designer Jonathan Ive.

Smith branched out into womenswear in 1993, after Grace Coddington shot the same men’s shirt on female models in US Vogue for six consecutive issues. ‘Bruce Weber, Patrick Demarchelier, all those famous photographers and stylists were borrowing loads of Paul Smith for men and putting them on Linda Evangelista and all those fantastic girls.’ He had to fight to get his womenswear right: ‘There was a period where I felt a bit overwhelmed by it all because I don’t have a strong feminine side.’ Again, Pauline was his saviour. ‘All the clothes she wore when we first met were made by her and they were really beautiful. The way the collars rolled and the stitching, the way the sleeves were put in and the proportions and the pockets. That’s definitely reflected in the latest collection (A/W 2016, just shown at London Fashion Week) which I honestly think is the best collection we’ve ever done. It’s very much based on Pauline.’

He now has ten shops in London and hundreds across the world. The Los Angeles branch, an employee recently told him, has been declared the most Instagramable spot in the city. Its bold pink façade was inspired by a trip to Mexico City to see one of Smith’s favourite architects, Luis Barragán. ‘It’s become almost a problem.’ Tourists favouring a bubblegum-pink selfie backdrop do not necessarily translate into customers. His next London retail spot, opening this month at the new Dover Street Market, will recreate his first shop in Nottingham all those years ago.

He worries for London’s future creative generations: ‘London has changed a lot in terms of the rent structure, which is a killer of creativity. The sad thing is that eventually property moguls investing in the London market will realise that at some point you have to stop because you will have empty shops. After the 2008 crash lots of foreign companies bought property; even in Notting Hill the amount of people [living] in the street has declined because a lot of the properties are owned but nobody lives in them. There’s a lot of wealth for people who shouldn’t have wealth.’

For now his energy levels show little sign of flagging — he starts each day with a 5.15am swim at the Royal Automobile Club on Pall Mall and works into the early hours, corresponding with the Paul Smith offices in Japan and Australia. He recently streamlined his mens and womens-wear lines from seven to two offerings, Paul Smith and PS by Paul Smith, with collections coming into the shops four times a year. ‘It’s all a bit weird at the moment — in a good way. I’ve been [designing] for 40 years and sometimes you need to take a breath and readjust. The world is so oversupplied; not just fashion, everything. There’s too much stuff out there and for us it’s how you have relevance in an overcrowded world.’ He sees 2016 as a regrouping year: ‘We’re all running so fast,’ he says.

Although he inherited two of Pauline’s children from a previous relationship, he regrets that they never had children of their own: ‘It would have been nice but it never worked out.’ He thinks about his legacy often and has plans for a charitable trust. ‘Hopefully the business will continue, with the younger staff here taking it on, but there will also be a very substantial trust that will be about helping young people. That’s in place, without an actual purpose yet. We haven’t quite worked out what it will be yet. It won’t necessarily be about fashion, it might be about travel, opening doors, opportunities for young people.’

Whatever it turns out to be, he says that he and his wife have a fail-safe mechanism for litmus-testing what they are doing. ‘We always say, “Does it come from the heart?” ’ he says. ‘It was never about money, any of it. So we can always say that. It came from the heart.’