Moda Ruvida: Paul Smith and his unsuitable situations, with some cultural irony

Tailored and relaxed clothes for inappropriate efforts — the Paul Smith show in Milan is still a compendium of sharp formality and broken youth

Paul Smith and the Unsuitable Situations — from Gavin Lambert to Savile Row

Los Angeles, the seventies — The Goodbye People, Gavin Lambert: unlikely characters: a widowed millionaire girl, lonely in Pasadena; a boy beautiful as a Viking who makes everyone fall in love with him, has to change his passport four times. Unsuitable Situations. That’s a fragment of the title of the Paul Smith show — we’re not in Los Angeles, we’re not in London. We’re in Milan.

Long cigarette trousers, loose. Undone ties. Sharp geometric silhouettes. British irony and British style at their best. Unsuitable Situations, how many. Tailored clothes worn at precisely the moment you’d least think to reach for them — say, helping a farmer during the grape harvest in Tuscany. Paul Smith was one of the first to deflate the formality of Savile Row. We know it – it was Paul Smith who invented the concept store — a shop where you don’t know what you’ll find, but you know that whatever you find expresses the same idea.

Paul Smith, sunflowers in England, and the broken youth

English humor is a form of literature. The dry one-liners, a touch of grey, a constant indifference to social respectability. The fashion for Sir Paul Smith: the quiet wit. The long legs of the models Paul Smith chooses for his casting can call to mind the long ears of a rabbit. Supple; as resilient as the stem of a sunflower in an English field — where sunflowers aren’t scorched by the Tuscan sun, where the grape is your dreamy Sangiovese.

Paul Smith’s men are the ones you used to run into in Los Angeles with Gavin Lambert; in London you find them perched on bicycle saddles, leaning against curbs. The green jacket or petrol blue, before heading to Ascot with the Duke of Westminster. Royal & Rock, the graphic still ironic, the Italian tailoring a little less rigid than the English kind — Paul Smith is a deviation from conformity. Paul Smith used to speak of his admiration for Giorgio Armani’s sartorial deconstruction.

You can picture him, Paul Smith, dressing the models and checking them over before sending them down the runway. Adjusting a detail, fastening a shirt cuff. The tie he won’t knot — left loose like a scarf, an affectation. You can picture him winding these boys up, making them understand why they were chosen.

As with other masters of design and fashion, as with others who have been sending out collections for years, Paul Smith knows well that casting is as much the show as the clothes. Paul Smith’s boys have the flavor of youth — it’s a broken youth, if only from youthful recklessness, still broken. The face is that of a boxer without muscles, a cyclist who falls without getting hurt. Triangular faces, sharp noses, with the kind of crooked bridge Caesar had, in Rome.

A few freckles, large eyes shaped like diamonds drawn by a second-grader who has just been told what a square is — and can’t quite manage to draw a square, so a diamond comes out instead.

Paul Smith, irony — as in Agatha Christie

The blond hair turns ash. The dark skin isn’t chocolate but flour for a cocoa muffin. The male limbs aren’t oak but chestnut shells. The flowers are the flowers Agatha Christie tended carefully in her garden while writing A Body in the Library: a girl dressed as Marilyn Monroe found lifeless in the Colonel’s drawing room — another novel, like Lambert’s, that is back in fashion.

Agatha Christie managed to carry irony through her books, mixing cynical and delicious asides among strangulations, poisons, and daggers. In his own medium, Paul Smith is a worthy companion: he brings the same iconoclastic urge to undercut every prejudice and preamble the fashion industry keeps stupidly imposing on itself. Paul Smith laughs at it — or rather, Paul Smith smiles: because even when you’re happy, you never take it seriously.