‘I bought Mughal-e-Azam posters’
...reveals ace fashion designer Paul Smith, who went on a shopping spree on Delhi streets; also gets candid about designing the Olympic stamp
International fashion designer Paul Smith, who was in the Capital, is looking at opening his third store in Mumbai this June. Excerpts from a tete-e-tete with After Hrs:
Tell us about your Delhi tour...
We went to Hauz Khas village, but some of them weren’t even open. I also went to see my own shop in the mall, it was awesome. I took a lot of photographs and bought some Bollywood posters and vintage tin boxes.
What posters?
Mughal-e-Azam. It appealed to me visually. I didn’t know about it, but just liked the imagery.
Are you planning to do something with them? I’m not too sure what I’m going to do with them. If you see my room in London, you’ll realise that I buy things like that all the time.
Read a lot about the special room. Tell us about it.
I’ve got enormous collections of everything. I enjoy collecting anything that’s just beautiful, or awful, or cheap, or expensive. I just like the mix. The graphics can be so useful for my jeans or tees. I even have around 5000 books in my room, countless CDs and robots.
It’s been described as a mess. Would ‘creative mess’ be the word for it?
Yes, it is. I tend to know where things are, which is quite cool. And I have a very big table in the middle. It’s a real mess, but I get to know if even the alignment changes.
Heard you are working on stamps for the upcoming Olympics too?
Yes, I was asked by the post office to design some stamps for the Olympics. I wanted to make some optimistic designs in cheerful colours — easy to understand, very graphic. I worked on it for almost a year. It’s a legal thing, you can’t get it wrong — there was the Olympic logo, even the Queen’s head had to be in a certain size. I didn’t understand how fanatical stamp collecting is, till I worked on this.
Is it true that you’re obsessed with rabbits?
It’s totally false (laughs). In the early ’80s, I was on a trip going from London to my hometown Nottingham and I was with an American friend. I was day-dreaming when he asked me why I was looking so intently out of the window? I said, ‘I’m looking for rabbits because if I see one, my collection will sell well.’ I just made that up. He sent me a papier mache rabbit when he returned to New York, and spread the word. Since then I get around 20 rabbits a week (laughs). I should have said diamonds instead of rabbits!
...reveals ace fashion designer Paul Smith, who went on a shopping spree on Delhi streets; also gets candid about designing the Olympic stamp
International fashion designer Paul Smith, who was in the Capital, is looking at opening his third store in Mumbai this June. Excerpts from a tete-e-tete with After Hrs:
Tell us about your Delhi tour...
We went to Hauz Khas village, but some of them weren’t even open. I also went to see my own shop in the mall, it was awesome. I took a lot of photographs and bought some Bollywood posters and vintage tin boxes.
What posters?
Mughal-e-Azam. It appealed to me visually. I didn’t know about it, but just liked the imagery.
Are you planning to do something with them? I’m not too sure what I’m going to do with them. If you see my room in London, you’ll realise that I buy things like that all the time.
Read a lot about the special room. Tell us about it.
I’ve got enormous collections of everything. I enjoy collecting anything that’s just beautiful, or awful, or cheap, or expensive. I just like the mix. The graphics can be so useful for my jeans or tees. I even have around 5000 books in my room, countless CDs and robots.
It’s been described as a mess. Would ‘creative mess’ be the word for it?
Yes, it is. I tend to know where things are, which is quite cool. And I have a very big table in the middle. It’s a real mess, but I get to know if even the alignment changes.
Heard you are working on stamps for the upcoming Olympics too?
Yes, I was asked by the post office to design some stamps for the Olympics. I wanted to make some optimistic designs in cheerful colours — easy to understand, very graphic. I worked on it for almost a year. It’s a legal thing, you can’t get it wrong — there was the Olympic logo, even the Queen’s head had to be in a certain size. I didn’t understand how fanatical stamp collecting is, till I worked on this.
Is it true that you’re obsessed with rabbits?
It’s totally false (laughs). In the early ’80s, I was on a trip going from London to my hometown Nottingham and I was with an American friend. I was day-dreaming when he asked me why I was looking so intently out of the window? I said, ‘I’m looking for rabbits because if I see one, my collection will sell well.’ I just made that up. He sent me a papier mache rabbit when he returned to New York, and spread the word. Since then I get around 20 rabbits a week (laughs). I should have said diamonds instead of rabbits!
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