Suits, Shoes and Shirts to Travel In: Designing With Limitations, and Innovation

What successful, multimillionaire designer still works the shop floor, and still attends the fabric fairs? A curious type, Paul Smith has always been one for human interaction, and observation. That’s where he gets much of his inspiration. It’s why he works on the shop floor of his Albemarle Street store on a Saturday and why he still packs his bags and heads to France and Italy for the seasonal fabric fairs. At the start of his career, he recalls traveling to County Donegal on the Atlantic coast of Northern Ireland. A young son had taken over the family fabric mill there, and he was willing to work in a different way for Smith. “I went to visit the mill, which was in a Methodist church on a beach in Donegal, in a place called Downings. The phone number was ‘Downings, 3-2′ and when you rang it, it went through to a telephone exchange in somebody’s house. It was hilarious. And cows used to wander in on the beach into the mill,” recalled Smith. Despite its humble situation, that mill delivered, and then some. “I took things like a Donegal tweed, and later a Harris Tweed, that traditionally would have come in geography teacher colors like

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