Finders keepers

Fashion designer and inveterate collector Paul Smith shares a few of his favourite things in a new book, and here with his friend and travelling companion Deyan Sudjic

- DEYAN SUDJIC

Paul Smith, Vêtements pour Homme, as Smith called his first shop, was a life-affirming injection of wit and tailoring-with-a-twist into the cheesecloth and tank-top darkness of the 1970s. He had a tiny space, just 10ft by 10ft, in Nottingham, the English city in which he grew up. Its hours were 10am to 6pm, Fridays and Saturdays only. Along with the clothes, there was an Andy Warhol print on the wall that Smith still wishes he could have afforded to buy, and a selection of antique jewellery.

Then as now, what drives Smith is the delight he takes in discovering things, and the pleasure that he takes in sharing his finds with his customers, whom he treats as friends. Sometimes the discoveries end up on sale in his shops. He rescued the Filofax from the clutches of generations of compulsive list makers, before it became a badge of shame, a totem of the toxic materialism of the 1980s. He stocked vintage books, as well as Braun calculators by Dieter Rams.

He likes to tell you about the things he has seen. He once called to ask whether I’d been to Matt’s Gallery in London, the pioneering space for installation art run by Robin Klassnik. He had just seen ‘20:50’, the 200 gallons of sump oil that Richard Wilson had used to flood the building to spectacular effect. ‘It’s the last weekend of the exhibition, you have to go right now,’ he urged.