Sir Paul Smith’s new memoir asks a generation of designers to prioritise steady growth over instant scale, using his five-decade career as proof of concept. Threads: My Life in Style recounts how a windowless Nottingham shop launched in 1970 grew into a global label present in 50 countries, and offers explicit counsel to students and young designers that patience pays.
The Story in Pictures
The book mixes practical advice with the odd prop. Smith demonstrates how simple gestures and humour aided his long relationship with Japan, where the brand now operates more than 20 stores. "The chickens are the reason I was successful in Japan," he says, explaining that rubber chickens and other visual jokes bridged language gaps on early visits dating back to 1982.
His London office is presented in the memoir as a curated jumble of daily fan gifts and objects that map the company’s social history, from a plastic goose plastered with stamps to a clockwork toy drummer and nativity scenes made from nuts. Smith says he replies to contributors with handwritten postcards after his 05:30 swim, a ritual he uses to underline what he calls the importance of good manners for business longevity. "Good manners is really important in business, especially for longevity," he reflects.
Threads traces Smith’s biography back to a teenage cycling accident that ended ambitions of turning professional, sending him instead into fashion. He opened his first shop in 1970 and famously took just £38 on the first day; he recounts that his wife bought most of the takings to support the venture. The memoir is part archive, part advice manual, and part cultural scrapbook, populated by encounters with public figures who reinforced the brand’s cultural reach.
Music and sport recur as motifs. Smith describes friends from the music world, including David Bowie, for whom he later designed a T-shirt to accompany the album Black Star, and stories involving Paul McCartney. He also recalls sheltering George Best in a spare room during the 1970s when they worked on a children’s clothing line, anecdotes that underline how personal networks fed the company’s early life.
Smith says turning 80 helped prompt the book, a desire to pass on learned practices rather than prescribe rapid expansion as the sole route to success. Threads: My Life in Style is published as a record of those lessons, and as a reminder that a fashion house’s distinctiveness can depend as much on personality, ritual and small acts of courtesy as on runway moments or instant market scale.
