"To do a good job you’ve just got to want to do it" – Sir Paul Smith on colour, credibility and communication

Car Design News: Was it always the plan to release a Mini x Paul Smith production car after the 2021 Strip concept came out?

Paul Smith: Honestly, I can’t remember, but I’ve always kept in touch with Mini. You can misbehave a bit with concept cars and we love them, but to do a production car is very exciting [and different].

CDN: There are exceptions, but many ‘car x fashion’ collaborations end badly. Why did you think you could do a better job?

PS: I’ve seen ones where I just think ‘that’s outrageous and an insult’. The designer literally just puts their name on the car and maybe one red line. I was determined not to do that. It would be embarrassing.  Ultimately, you’re literally putting your name on it after all… But with a job like this, you can’t do a different sort of car because you inherit the car that’s there. So first of all you’ve got to like the car, which I do. Then you think, ‘what can I do?’ A lot of it has to do with mass production. The car’s going down a line and if it has to go left and right of the line, then obviously it’s another process which slows things up and is more expensive.

CDN: What materials do you like to consider?

PS: We still work with yarn a lot, whereas nearly every design company now just does colour on the computer. We take yarn and wrap it around a card and get the stripes and put colours together, because what people forget about clothes is that yarn is three-dimensional, so the colours reflect on each other.

CDN: What other aspects of design interest you?

PS: I feel passionate about texture. My office is a big maze of stuff. In there, you’ll see small and big, rough and smooth and shadows. That ‘rough and smooth’ can be a Harris tweed with a silk shirt. In a car, you can have rough and smooth too, but it’s rarely there.

CDN: Where do you think your unusual sense of colour comes from?

PS: I sometimes underestimate the importance of my wife. She studied fashion and couture originally, but then as a mature student went to the Slade School of Art [in central London] and painted. So a lot of our weekends are spent looking at Caravaggio, Cezanne or diverse renaissance work and when you look at those masters of painting and see some of the colours they put together, they’re magical. You think, ‘I’d never imagine those two colours together’. I think the grey with the green on the Mini Paul Smith Edition looks interesting.

CDN: Do you subscribe to colour theory?

PS: Definitely not. People often ask whether I look at colour predictions and things like that. And I say, ‘No, hopefully I give them.’ But I did a project with the Anni Albers Foundation for the Tate Modern that was fantastic and when I was in my early twenties, I worked as a colourist for Benetton.

CDN: Will you hit payday if Mini sells a certain number of these cars?

PS: I’m the one that should know, but I never know. It always starts with whether I’m interested in doing something. I get offered a lot of collaborations and sometimes the first thing people talk about is the money. That’s a put-off for me immediately, because it’s normally the wrong job. To do a good job you’ve just got to want to do it.

CDN: Do you like to drive anymore?

PS: Yeah, I bought a Mini E and I have a Mini Paul Smith Edition in white on order. 

CDN: Didn’t you used to own a Bristol?

PS: I had a Bristol 405 for many years, a beautiful car. I bought it on Boxing Day in 1982 when I was bored – before eBay – from the Bristol members magazine. It cost £2,000 and I used it every day for a long time in London and it went to Japan for a while for an exhibition on ‘Britishness’. I spent £18,000 restoring it – including the addition of Savile Row material seatbelts – but then it deteriorated quite quickly because it was out in all weathers and I sold it four years ago.

CDN: Is there a car you ‘wish you’d designed’?

PS: Not really. The cars I admire are ones like Morgan and Lancia, those traditional cars that had things you can’t really do anymore, like a leather strap around the engine cover.

CDN: Do you keep abreast of the car industry more generally? Do you like any brands beyond Mini, ones you think are taking an interesting approach?

PS: I think the sad thing about the car industry is the same as with kitchens and many other products that have a long process – they’ve become so homogenised. Unfortunately, getting ahead is very hard because everybody’s onto everything really quickly. That’s why, especially in fashion, the aura around the designer or the brand is incredibly important. I was driving down Regent Street [in London’s West End] at 6.30am the other morning and looking at these shop windows as I was going along and just thought, ‘they all look exactly the same’. Then when you look up, one shop is called Tommy Hilfiger, or Boggi or Cos. Same with the world of media and magazines. Obviously, your personal edge will be your writing skills and point of view, whether it’s a bit more investigative or…

CDN: Increasingly when I write, I ask, ‘what would AI not think of?’ Do you work in a similar way now?

PS: Exactly. That’s why I think hopefully he [Mini head of design Holger Hampf] won’t sack me! We’re just trying to be a bit more relaxed with people – and with everything – because we are human beings and we can do this. We can communicate in a way which is honest