--- title: "Paul Smith Started With a Bike Crash and a Room 12 Feet Square" url: https://quietmenace.com/culture/paul-smith-nottingham-designer/ author: Quiet Menace Editors section: Culture published: 2026-10-29 updated: 2026-10-29 topics: Menswear History, Heritage Brands, Tailoring, Japan --- # Paul Smith Started With a Bike Crash and a Room 12 Feet Square > A teenage racer from Nottingham lost his cycling future in a crash. In 1970 he opened a windowless shop on a back lane, and the label that grew from it now sells around the world. In 1970, on Byard Lane in Nottingham, a young Nottingham man named Paul Smith opened a shop called Paul Smith Vêtements Pour Homme. The room measured about 12 feet by 12 feet, roughly three meters on each side, and it had no windows. It opened only on Fridays and Saturdays. According to the brand's own telling, the first shop manager was his Afghan hound, Homer. It is a modest start for a label that now has its own stores in dozens of countries, and the company is still headquartered in Nottingham. ## The racer who never turned pro Smith was born on July 5, 1946, in Beeston, Nottinghamshire, the youngest of three children. His father worked in the textile and clothing trade, and Paul left school at 15 with no qualifications to work in a Nottingham clothing warehouse. What he really wanted was to race bicycles for a living. At 17 a serious accident ended that plan. Wikipedia puts his hospital stay at more than three months, while the history Smith published with the British Fashion Council says six. Either way, it was a long recovery, and it changed his direction. Through new friends from a local art school he was introduced to painters such as Mondrian, Warhol and Kokoschka and to music from the Rolling Stones to Miles Davis. Cycling never left him, and the bike he crashed at 17 now sits in the company archive in Nottingham. ![A red and white road bike parked against a fence](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1556716257-fc34c34afc7e?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *A road bike of the type Smith hoped to race as a teenager. Photo by Gints Gailis on Unsplash* One of the people he met through that art school world was Pauline Denyer. She had trained as a fashion designer at the Royal College of Art in London and was teaching at the school. She became his partner and later his wife, and she was part of the business from its early years. Smith learned the trade before he put his name on it. He worked at Birdcage, a Nottingham boutique where founder Janet Campbell put him in charge of menswear, and he took tailoring classes. He also worked with the Savile Row tailor Lincroft Kilgour, on the street covered in our [Savile Row bespoke visitor's guide](https://quietmenace.com/travel/savile-row-bespoke-visitors-guide/). ## A back lane in Nottingham The Byard Lane shop was small, windowless and open two days a week, and it was not his only job. Around the same period he also worked as a buyer for Browns, the London boutique. Among the earliest garments made under his name is a bespoke white wedding suit from 1970, still kept in the archive. The company grew around Nottingham rather than leaving it. In 2005 it opened a flagship in Willoughby House, a Grade II listed building a short walk from Byard Lane. The original shop closed in 2017, after 47 years. ## Paris, 1976 Six years after Byard Lane opened, Smith presented his first menswear collection in Paris. It was not a grand affair. He showed it in a friend's borrowed flat on Vaugirard, on the Left Bank, and he returned to Paris twice a year for decades after. Only in the last few seasons has the menswear show moved to Milan. The London shop came next. In 1979 Smith opened on Floral Street in Covent Garden, and in 1987 he reached New York with a store on Fifth Avenue. Through the 1980s he became one of the first designers to put photographic prints on fabric, and he loosened the cut of the formal suit at the same time Giorgio Armani was doing the same in Italy. A womenswear line followed in 1993, the same year he took over R. Newbold, a bankrupt company founded in 1885. ## Stripes and side projects If one motif stands for the brand, it is the stripe. Wikipedia calls the multicolored stripe and the pinstripe his trademarks, and the brand says stripes have been central to its design since the early days. It has been updated rather than retired. For Autumn/Winter 2016 the company introduced the Artist Stripe, a newer take on the same idea. ![Multicolored striped fabric with textured stitching](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1768687983653-bbc3a06d73c2?w=1600&h=1067&q=80&auto=format&fit=crop) *Multicolored striped fabric, the kind of pattern that became Paul Smith's signature. Photo by Bernd Dittrich on Unsplash* The stripe also traveled onto other people's products. In September 2012 Smith released a version of the Leica X2 compact camera, priced at £1,750, from the German maker best known for rangefinders like the [Leica M6](https://quietmenace.com/tech/leica-m6-film-revival/). In 2015 he worked with Anglepoise on its lamps and with Land Rover on a Defender. The same year he launched a line called A Suit To Travel In. ## Japan and the knighthood The business that made Paul Smith a global company was in Japan. The first Japanese store opened in Tokyo in 1984, and in the 1980s Smith built a commercial relationship with the Japanese trading house Itochu to widen distribution across the country. Itochu became his Japanese licensee, and today the brand has a shop in Ginza, one of the Tokyo shopping districts that sit alongside the neighborhoods in our [Daikanyama and Nakameguro guide](https://quietmenace.com/travel/tokyo-daikanyama-nakameguro-guide/). In 2006 Itochu bought a 40 percent stake in the company. Smith kept the majority, and the business stayed private. Recognition at home came in steps. Smith was made a Royal Designer for Industry in 1991 and a CBE in the 1994 New Year Honours. In 1995 the Design Museum in London marked 25 years of the business with an exhibition called True Brit, and in 2013 it staged Hello, My Name Is Paul Smith. He was knighted in the 2000 Birthday Honours, and in 2020 he was made a Companion of Honour for services to fashion. By November 2025 the company said it had about 130 stores in more than 60 countries, and the British Fashion Council history counts more than 17,000 stockists. Smith turned 80 in July 2026. Ahead of the brand's 50th anniversary, his foundation began cataloging an archive of more than 5,000 garments and objects at the Nottingham headquarters, and it now runs residencies that give young designers access to it. For more, see [menswear history](https://quietmenace.com/topics/menswear-history/), [heritage brands](https://quietmenace.com/topics/heritage-brands/), [tailoring](https://quietmenace.com/topics/tailoring/), [Japan](https://quietmenace.com/topics/japan/) and the [Quiet Menace culture section](https://quietmenace.com/culture/). The [Wikipedia entry on Paul Smith](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Smith_(fashion_designer)) covers the honors in full, the [British Fashion Council history on Google Arts and Culture](https://artsandculture.google.com/story/HgXRYCD8C3pHIg) walks through the early years, and Wallpaper's [visit to the Nottingham archive](https://www.wallpaper.com/fashion-beauty/paul-smith-archive-nottingham) shows what is kept there. The detail that sums up the whole story sits in that archive. Among the suits and stripes is the bicycle that ended a teenage racing career, kept a short walk from the lane where a room 12 feet square started everything else. --- Filed under: [Menswear History](https://quietmenace.com/topics/menswear-history/), [Heritage Brands](https://quietmenace.com/topics/heritage-brands/), [Tailoring](https://quietmenace.com/topics/tailoring/), [Japan](https://quietmenace.com/topics/japan/) Hero image: Photo by YUNAN WANG on Unsplash (Unsplash License)