Paul Smith’s
Cabinet of Wonders

In the late 60s and early 70s I was just discovering Italian design. Any form of product, design, or architecture coming out of Italy was impressive to me—they seemed to be able to do things I’d never seen before. The Brionvega Radio called “Cubo'' was designed by Richard Sapper and Marco Zanuso. It was inspired by an army field radio, with the hinge on one side so it closes to look like a box. The fact that you could create modern designs based on something that’s very utilitarian was massively inspiring for me. It ran in parallel to playing with irreverence and opposites in my own designs. I managed to save some cash and buy one of the radios, it was one of my pride and joys to have a piece of Italian design of my own.

I was immediately drawn to the simple shape of the radio, as well as the way it opens up to reveal complexity within the face and features. I liked that it was a playful device that required the user to physically unlatch to operate. I started by doing a series of loose sketches. I have always leaned into fundamental shapes (squares, triangles, circles) in my own work, so to build or construct an image using the silhouette of the radio made a lot of sense. The sketches eventually led to a refined drawing, which resulted in the idea to create a 3-dimensional work. I wanted to make something that could be held, turned and viewed from various angles that reflect the physicality of the Brionvega Cubo. It is clear that this object has influenced Paul’s designs and fashion. As an artist and collector myself (I have been a long time gleaner of fossils and minerals), I understand the importance of collectorship. I believe curating a collection is an art unto itself, but so much more for the artist or creative because the collection extends into their practice. Which, in turn, is ultimately collected by someone else.

I started to visit Japan in the early 80s when I signed a license agreement there and had reason to visit very regularly. I soon realized that their innovation was ahead of many other countries, and towards the end of the decade product design in Japan was becoming even more advanced. There was a designer named Naoki Sakai, from a company called Water Design. He designed the Olympus O to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Olympus. It was made from state-of-the-art materials, but it had a traditional, vintage-looking design. Each one was numbered from 0 to 20,000 and they sold out very quickly and became collectors’ items. I bought one for myself, and several to sell in my shop in London. I used to buy and import a lot of interesting things you couldn’t buy anywhere and sell them in my first London shop in Covent Garden—cigarette lighters, cameras, staple guns, Dyson vacuum cleaners, and much more. The Olympus camera is one of the only things I still have today—it’s stuck together with tape, but I still cherish it!

Since I was a child I’ve built collections: thousands of bottle caps (these days, the choice edits fill a cigar box); hundreds of replica NASCAR cars that I used to line up in varying orders while my dad watched the race religiously every Sunday; a piece of board kept under my bed onto which I glued one of every Jelly Belly flavor, each jelly bean labeled. My penchant for obsessive collecting drives my artistic identity, which, like the varied collections from my past, reflects an open-ended curiosity towards the material culture of the world. As far as creative influences go, Paul Smith is also to credit. During a trip to London, while in art school, my classmates and I visited Paul at his office thanks to an introduction by the late, great designer Clive Piercy. We sat with Paul in his curio-filled office for an hour. He didn’t talk about his clothing, but instead pulled out countless artifacts, telling their stories and why he liked them. During that visit, I first learned about the importance of exploration as process. Sometimes acts of collecting, traveling, shopping, or flipping through book after book, can be more important than the final product. It was also life-changing to see someone like Paul work in a way that was completely disinterested in singular categorization and instead deeply explore anything and everything of interest to him. I was affected by his confidence in knowing that those millions of reference points would eventually be gracefully funneled into a larger, cohesive vision. In this spirit, I decided to use Paul’s Olympus O-Product camera as a jumping off point for an open, improvised exploration of circles, milled aluminum, Japan, 80s fashion and technology, Dyson vacuum tubes, and spaghetti. The resulting mixed media drawings currently fill my office wall. Who knows, maybe something from them will spark years of fruitful work?

My wife, Pauline, was originally a fashion designer at the Royal College of Art. In the early 80s she decided to stop fashion to study art history and learn the skill of painting. She did very well to enter the famous London Slade School of Art as a mature student with very few places and 600 applicants. She worked from life mostly as a painter at the Slade. When she finished, she wanted to encourage the continuation of painting from life, so we sponsored the Slade’s life room models, and also a student who was studying painting from life at the school. Our first student was a young man called James Lloyd whose schooling at the Slade Pauline and I financed from 1994 to 1996. When he left the Slade, he entered a famous competition at London’s National Portrait Gallery which was called the BP Portrait Award. He won the award and with it a cash prize and a commission to paint someone. Although the National Portrait Gallery had no idea that I had put him through school, the commission was to paint me for their permanent collection. They were amazed when they realized we knew each other. In 1998, the painting was completed and presented at a dinner at the gallery, a very special moment. I’m pleased to say James is now a full-time portrait painter and very successful, and I continue to support young artists through a bursary I have with Royal Academy in London. My Foundation is launching this year with the aim to give helpful advice to creative people.

Collectorship was instilled in me at a young age, a passion that now informs my work more than any other methodology. As a girl, my sister and I would go on exploration “missions” throughout our neighbourhood, with an extra fascination in the tiny alleys that snaked through the town. We’d roam around, stopping to pluck flowers from lawns, and in the process, discover tiny delights like discarded buttons or small toys. Running our hands over these objects, we would invent stories about their origins, and how they found their way to this spot. We’d ask if they were once loved, and if so, what led to their ultimate dismissal? These treasure-hunting missions planted the seeds of curiosity and somehow, at such early years, a rough approximation of nostalgia. My father further encouraged this appreciation of ephemera. After dinner on Friday nights, he would bring out a large fish bowl filled with special objects. He would float his hand over the bowl, then dip in and pluck out whatever came to his hand—an antique bottle of citric acid crystals with a Hebrew label, used by his grandmother to add the “sour” to her sweet-and-sour stuffed cabbage rolls, or a miniature magnifying glass for tiny detective work, or a tin of lozenges with an illustration of two puzzled elderly adults on the lid, “Senior Mo-Mints.” Whichever mystery object was selected from the bin, he would share the tale of its significance to him, and as such, to us. As an artist, however, my concept of collectorship has become slightly more idiosyncratic. My works—candles—have a temporal spirit. Sitting on the shelf with that little flammable wick, one might wonder: what will it be like if I burn it, and, within minutes, watch it come undone? And if not brought to the flame now, when? Some people who own my pieces assure me that they will abstain from the burning rite. Though honestly, I think once it leaves the studio, and finds a new home, it is set free. It can tell its own story apart from me, burning or not. All I desire is for my work to be cherished, as much as my father cherished the fishbowl objects, and as I cherish my ever-growing collection.

In the late 1990s I was privileged enough to get to know Jonathan Ive, who was a young designer working for a British product design company called Tomato. As we all know, Jony was head-hunted by Steve Jobs for Apple to great acclaim and success and worked there for almost 30 years. He gave me an Apple Mac computer that he designed in 1998, and in 2000 I displayed it in my shop window. Previously, computers looked like bland, characterless pieces of office equipment, so his design with color, shape, and translucent materials was absolutely revolutionary. In the year 2000, Apple designed some amazing Cube speakers which were breathtakingly modern. Having been raised around very large, solid Wharfedale speakers in both my home and at work, which were apparently the best for all aspects of modern music, I was astounded by the size of the Apple speakers and also their quality. The fact that you could see the inner-workings or “guts” of the product is a way of thinking about things differently, which I do every day in my job.

“​See the inner workings...”​ is a poster design inspired by my childhood and Paul Smith's appreciation for Apple Cube speakers. During the early 2000s, I was in elementary school, and I vividly recall many advertisements, tv shows, and electronics that still inspire me today. To create a design that nods to an era that was influential to me, I decided to design a rendition of Paul’s signature green Granny Smith apple print that focuses on themes of transparency, perspective, and technology. With the use of gradients, various stroke weights, and an excerpt from Smith’s story about his Apple speakers, I was able to execute a design that can be flipped vertically to offer another perspective. Whether the apples are viewed as if they’re floating from the bottom or falling from the top of the poster, it allowed me to relate to Paul Smith and Apple’s ideology of thinking differently about my creative process.

For those of you who know some of my history, you’ll know that as a teenager I was a racing cyclist and I have continued to be very close to the sport since then, still keeping in touch with many of the professional riders of today. It was with great pride and privilege that in 2013 I was asked to design the famous Giro d’Italia race leader’s jersey, which is pink and always has been. It’s a difficult job because it has to be pink, it has to have the various tour sponsors’ names on it, and then somehow you have to find a way to put your character and design slant on it. This I did in a very subtle way, with the edge of one sleeve in one of my famous stripes, and there was a little sketch of a cyclist, and then the Paul Smith logo but applied in quite an abstract way on the hem of the jersey. Three things about the jersey have particular personal significance: my original jersey was blessed by the Pope at the Vatican; the ex-world champion and close friend Mark Cavendish worked hard to win the first stage of the race in Naples so that he could wear the race leader’s jersey, albeit only for one day; somebody that I admired and met on several occasions was the overall winner, Vincenzo Nibali. The whole experience was truly amazing.

My current body of work consists of various hand-built coiled sculptures. I experiment with scale and form. On the exterior, the pieces are detailed to resemble or capture the essence of their “in real life” subject. Each piece has a hollow interior which upon examination gives away the coil built process of how the piece is sculpted in clay. All of the pieces are sculpted using only photographs as reference. My work aims to push the boundaries of what objects mean to us in a consumerist society and question why we see ourselves profoundly in clothing. The item assigned to me was Paul’s 2013 Giro d’ Italia Jersey. It’s such an iconic item, not only because of its very memorable color but because you can see it was Paul who designed it. I found Paul’s approach to designing the jersey relatable to my own process. He had to work with both color and branding constraints and still put the “Paul Smith made this” in the design. Similarly to my sculptures, there is a certain trueness to the object that must remain but my hand, or in other words, authorship, also shines through. Paul’s famous stripes, a sketch of a cyclist, and his logo were some of the details that tastefully made it his. It’s an incredible piece that honors him, his brand and the spirit of cycling.