Paul Smith Fall/Winter 2016 Paris

PARIS, JANUARY 24, 2016

by LUKE LEITCH

Sir Paul Smith is regularly stopped on the street in London and beyond by men who thank him for the suits they got married in. Prime ministers and pouting rock stars alike slip into clothes stamped with his name when they want to impress: The cult of Smith is a broad church.

Which is why, for the sake of manageability, he has had to tailor the span and schedule of his sermons a little—by combining seven of his collections for men and women into two. “The reaction has been awesome,” he said backstage today: “We’ve reorganized the entire studio, and we are on a little bit of a high.”

Perhaps it’s because Smith is now squeezing several formerly differently delineated diffusion propositions—suiting, more casual, and fashion-forward—under a single flag, but today’s collection sometimes felt almost stressfully eclectic to watch. It was an impression boosted by the fact that the models came at you from two directions at once, to an impressively mixed soundtrack, which was like a well-stocked MP3 player set to random on hyper-speed—although “Step On” by the Happy Mondays and “Come Together” by the Beatles do sound damn fine when played simultaneously.

Upon backstage contemplation, however, there was harmony to be found in the chatter. Smith’s coats and trousers with front-lateral jacquard vertical stripes had oomph, and his powerfully colored narrow-collared reverse-shearling topcoats even more so. Trouser shapes kicked from gentle low flare to narrow high crop (the better to flash a boot in). There was plenty of tailoring deformalized by tinglingly colored zip-ups. Eccentric embroideries included the curled outline of paisley tears on suiting and washed denim, and teeth-baring dinosaurs on shirting and knits. As happens only rarely at menswear, the clothes look better in this gallery than they appeared in the flesh: The format here was such that it felt like you only had an instant to see a look before something completely different came along. It’s a minor gripe, though. Sir Paul will not stop being accosted by happy customers in the street any time soon.