Fashion Icon Sir Paul Smith Dreamed of a Whole Different Career

The Editors of GQ
Updated
On episode 4 of GQ's Mad Influence, the British designer joins editor-in-chief Jim Nelson for a career-spanning conversation.
Listen to Mad Influence free on Apple Podcasts.

You know Sir Paul Smith’s suits: elegant, impeccable, honest, and exquisitely made. You know his signature pattern: the vertical stripes in a riot of colors, on shirts and linings. But you probably don’t know much about one of menswear’s modern icons. Particularly, that he almost wasn’t one.

"I fell into fashion after a car and I met, and the car won," legendary designer Sir Paul Smith says of what led him away from his aspirations of becoming a pro cyclist. After he'd been hospitalized from the accident for three months, he and several other hospital patients decided to meet up for drinks in a local pub that was also, as it turned out, the go-to watering hole for art students at a nearby school. Smith got to talking, encounters the world of fashion head-on, and boom: the rest is history.

In a career-spanning conversation for episode 4 of our Mad Influence podcast, GQ editor-in-chief Jim Nelson talks to Smith about what makes him such an menswear GOAT, the signature stripes, his pink-walled Instagram-porn store in Los Angeles (some call it the most Instagrammed backdrop in the world), and the boundless energy that drives him to continually break new ground in an already storied career.

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