“This is all live. I’m scared stiff!” So said Paul Smith as he presented his mainline collection at Pitti Uomo for the first time in 31 years this afternoon. We were in the golden renaissance-revival splendor of Villa Favard, part of the Polimoda fashion school. Smith presented the collection in a semi-trunk show, semi-lecture format. A small group of models came in and out as Smith ran us through the 16 looks they were wearing.
Despite his protestations Smith delivered a smooth and almost professorially accomplished commentary. He casually dropped some definitive asides on intarsia knits and wool fresco (“it’s quite an interesting yarn”) while holding forth on a collection he reported was loosely based on his formative experiences in the fleshpots of 1960s Soho in London.
Prominently lapelled shirts and petite kipper ties were printed with a jumble of Florentine icons peppered with nods to Soho, while Smith’s podium was a jumble of artists’ easels. The period he was referencing was famous for the louche shenanigans of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, and other brush-wielding habitués of Muriel Belcher’s bohemian dive bar, the Colony Room. White-painted shoes and a great linen smock shirt revived from a 1979 Smith collection illustrated this, as did Smith’s Freudian styling of tailored jacket over carpenter’s pants (part of a handsome collaboration with Lee). There was a grip bag designed to be soft and flexible enough to carry your portfolio in.
Smith himself was more interested in jazz than art as a youngster—he saw Miles Davis and Georgie Fame play The Flamingo Club—and here delivered some consummate improvisation over menswear standards via the specially embroidered shawl collar evening wear pieces he reported were especially in demand at his famously pink Los Angeles outpost. Jazzily toned outerwear—a turquoise field jacket, a yellow Harrington—created vivid punctuation marks against the colored scramble of checked trenches and striped shirts that were new interpretations of Smith’s house stripes. This was a lesson in expertly modulated menswear achieved through arranging the forces of informal bohemianism, workwear, and tailored propriety alongside each other in a triptych of harmonic opposition: cool.