LONDON — Paul Smith is again in Japan this week because the headline designer at Rakuten Vogue Week Tokyo, exhibiting his fall 2025 males’s and ladies’s collections, and selling a collaboration with Niwaki on specialist Japanese gardening instruments.
The style week is sponsored by the Tokyo-based tech conglomerate Rakuten. Smith’s present, which takes place on Wednesday night time on the Tokyo Nationwide Museum, is a part of Rakuten’s “by R” challenge, which goals to help the Japanese style business.
Whereas he often visits Japan for work, Smith mentioned he hasn’t staged a present within the nation for greater than a decade, and he can’t anticipate the second.
“We’re together with girls’s in addition to males’s, and there will likely be round 40 appears in whole, plus the brand new Barbour assortment,” mentioned Smith, who additionally created an unique orchid print based mostly on {a photograph} by his late father for the event.
Backstage at Paul Smith Males’s Fall 2025 assortment in Paris. Smith will likely be reprising his menswear presentation, and including girls’s appears, for a runway present in Tokyo on March 19.
Kuba Dabrowski/WWD
“Japan’s conventional flower is a chrysanthemum, however the different two belongings you see loads in Japan are the bonsai tree and the orchid. They’re very delicate and minimal, they usually positively match the Japanese aesthetic,” the designer mentioned in an interview shortly earlier than boarding the airplane to Tokyo.
The autumn males’s assortment, which Smith introduced in Paris in January, was stuffed with prints based mostly on the elder Smith’s color-drenched images — and the designer’s personal doodles — which appeared on matching shirts and ties.
The autumn assortment additionally channeled the straightforward glamour of the younger David Bailey and Terence Donovan who typically wearing heavy clothes and layers for out of doors style shoots.
That assortment featured heritage materials that had been tossed in a tumble dryer for a “dry, scruffy, classic” really feel, in keeping with Smith. It additionally included thornproof materials, space-dyed wool, and the Prince of Wales examine sample.
Smith may even be exhibiting his girls’s assortment, which he often presents in a showroom, and the 23-piece Paul Smith Loves Barbour assortment, which contains a Friesian cow print and which lands on store flooring in October.
A Barbour look from Paul Smith males’s fall 2025 assortment. Smith plans to place the brand new Barbour appears on his Tokyo runway on March 19.
Courtesy of Paul Smith
Ryo Matsumura, senior vp, managing govt officer, commerce and advertising firm, at Rakuten Group, described Smith’s participation within the week as “such a pivotal second.”
He added: “We imagine that partnering with world-class manufacturers is the important thing to boosting the Tokyo style scene’s presence internationally, and we’re excited to see Paul Smith’s affect resonate globally, carrying Tokyo’s distinctive type with it. Going ahead, Rakuten Vogue is dedicated to forging a good stronger partnership with the model.”
Japan is sort of a second residence for Smith, whose longtime minority investor and licensing companion is Itochu Corp. Smith has 150 shops within the nation, and it’s his largest market exterior of the U.Ok., producing 40 p.c of enterprise.
He’s typically greeted like a star, and clients love his cheeky humorousness, tender tailoring and use of colourful British menswear materials.
In a 2020 interview with WWD, Smith mentioned his Japanese enterprise survived for therefore lengthy as a result of he totally built-in into the nation and didn’t consider Japan as simply one other place to generate profits.
“I used to be humbled to go to this place known as Japan, which in ’83 was a spot you didn’t assume you’d ever go to in your life. Lots of the designers who have been going there at the moment had very large egos and really large requests about chauffeur-driven automobiles and first-class journey. I used to be simply fascinated to go,” he mentioned.
A Paul Smith retailer in Japan.
Courtesy Photograph
“I used to be within the tradition and meals. I didn’t moan about jet lag or about working lengthy hours. I went about 100 instances or perhaps 120 instances within the Eighties,” Smith added.
Throughout an interview earlier this week, Smith mentioned he’ll always remember the religion that Itochu had in him once they first partnered in 1984.
“They trusted me, and trusted the truth that I may open outlets and make them work,” mentioned Smith, including that Itochu, one among Japan’s largest basic buying and selling corporations, by no means requested him to change his collections or aesthetic to swimsuit the Japanese client.
Along with the present, Smith plans to go to Kyoto to see his retailer there, and do a collection of press appointments with the founding father of Niwaki, Jake Hobson. Niwaki, which provides specialist Japanese gardening instruments, relies within the U.Ok. with a retailer in London.
Paul Smith at Claridge’s lodge in London, the place he designed the 2024 Christmas tree.
Courtesy
Smith teamed with Niwaki on a co-branded collaboration that launched final 12 months. The collaboration features a tri-colored leather-based instrument bag, and secateurs with coloured leather-based wires wrapped across the handles to imitate the Paul Smith signature stripe. The gathering additionally consists of scissors and a weeding knife.
“It’s a really cool collaboration,” mentioned Smith, including that he and Hobson share a love of “all of the fantastic backyard instruments and delightful, wonderful secateurs for trimming bonsai bushes” and different delicate crops and flowers.
