Paul Smith

“Withnail and I. Withnail and I is a very interesting film, and very personal to me because the character of Withnail was a personal friend of mine and he actually packed boxes for Paul Smith in my very first warehouse. His name was Vivian MacKerrell. People who pack boxes are normally… And then they get this brown tape, and then they… Like this, and they pack the boxes, and then there’s a stamp or a Sharpie that they write on. Not with Vivian. First of all, he had to have James Brown playing. Second of all, he had this tape, which was… The trade name of the tape was called NOPI. He had the NOPI tape and he used to stand there like this and go, “Beautiful, beautiful!” Anyway, the film is brilliant. It’s real. The music’s fantastic. You’ve got to listen to it.”

“Breathless by Jean-Luc Godard. I’m privileged to say that he wore some Paul Smith clothes. He bought a very beautiful brown leather jacket. It’s really inspirational for me for more than one reason. One is… I’m going to put this down. One is because of editing. Very fast editing. And the other thing is color. Incidentally, when I’m talking about the color of this, I’m talking about the color levels, because it’s black-and-white film, but it sort of goes into almost sepia. I worked on Men in Black, and… and they said to me when they came in, “Which black do you want?” I said, “What?” He said, “Well, there’s about 120 blacks,” so, black is black is black.”

“This is My Beautiful Laundrette and the reason I chose that is very personal. Of course, the film is… was, in my opinion, very ahead of its time for all sorts of things. Quite political. It was about race, it was about the gay community and that… how it was just starting to become something you dare to be open about. Hanif Kureishi is a really good mate of mine. I’ve known him for years. Sadly, he’s in a wheelchair these days after a terrible accident, but he’s still writing. He’s still doing amazing things. Stephen Frears, who directed it, his father was my landlord in my very first flat. And then, of course, the other person in it is Daniel Day-Lewis, who I’m a very, very close friend of. We go back a long way. We go back to this time. What I like about it as a film, it’s real. It’s a real film. You feel like you are part of it. So that’s another one I’m going to definitely steal.”

“The other film I’m thinking about, because I work in Japan a lot: Kurosawa’s Kagemusha. There’s whole areas of this film where most of the color is army, khaki color, and then these… these electrifying bursts of red. So as a fashion designer, you can imagine you’re like this, and then suddenly you’ve got a bright color suddenly sitting on top of a very neutral base. So, even if you don’t understand it, even if you switch the sound off, it’s amazing. But don’t do either of those things.”

“Well, for my last pick, I’m going to close my eyes and pick at random. I might not know the movie, so I’m sorry about that. The Kid Brother, with Harold Lloyd. Very interesting that so many cowboy-related movies are starting to become popular again now, and they’re… great.”