MUCH is made in reports of the fact that Paul Smith doesn’t necessarily break ground with his collections (by his own admission he makes clothes that real girls want to wear and feel comfortable in, day-in, day-out), but that doesn’t stop them from being, really, pretty great as we saw today.
Panelled dresses that clashed block colour with animal-print pointillism were clever, not to mention covetable, as were the several incarnations of painterly broderie anglaise, all of which showed Smith’s artistic passion and skill that so often comes to the fore in his warm-weather collections. The artist in him continued to shine with brushstroke and dip-dye effects on coats and slip-on dresses, while his palette mixed up scarlet, sunset orange, and turquoise as blue as the Aegean Sea (hues that were inspired by his most recent menswear collection). His stripes, of course, were prevalent, but not in an emphatic way. They were more pastel than punchy – light and breathable layers to reach for when in when the temperatures rise and the office demands your presence.
It’s important to remember that Smith is a London designer who, unlike many of his contemporaries, still has a blossoming business to his name 45 years after he started it - which, by the way, remains free from a conglomerate’s control. If the clothes he was making weren’t continually worth writing home about, we’d say that’s ground-breaking enough.
With thanks to Mercedes Benz