Paul Smith on his ‘lovely and simple’ Milan Fashion Week debut, which has been decades in the making

The good thing about having an office overflowing with a lifetime of memorabilia like Paul Smith? You never know when something special from the past might pop up and inspire you next.

Recently, it was a souvenir book from Cairo that reappeared as if from nowhere that Smith had picked up while exploring the Pyramids with his wife, Pauline, many moons ago. Featuring scenes depicting the joy of travel in a hot-house palette with a healthy dose of nostalgia, the keepsake became the starting point for the S/S 2026 collection unveiled in Milan on Saturday afternoon.

Paul Smith on his Milan Fashion Week debut

‘One of the girls [in the office] must have pulled it out to look at it and as soon as I saw it, I thought it would be a great starting point for this show,’ enthused Smith during a preview with Wallpaper* ahead of the show. ‘Look at all these lovely colours and then look at my colours; we’ve got the green, the blue, the red, the yellow, the pink! This show is all about the colours you see when you travel.’

Opting to show in Milan for the first time in his brand’s 54-year history, the parallels between the designer’s appetite for new adventures and a collection of clothes to do just that played out on the catwalk.

Silk shirts with abstract sunsets in fuchsia, tangerine, bright green and sky blue came alongside striped twinset knits; jackets in ‘tumbled leather’ were patch-worked with oversized flowers and stems hand drawn by the studio; and super lightweight suits crafted from a silk-blend he has coined ‘compact’, ‘which means they’re woven very, very tightly, which means they've got all this lovely springiness to them,’ he explained. All had lived-in, love-worn charm.

‘Quite a lot of the clothes have got quite an old feeling to them, which is interesting,’ he said. ‘Don’t just always dismiss the past, you know, because so so much [present-day life] is about what's next, what’s next, what’s next.’

To accent the capsule travel wardrobe, details inspired by trinkets collected by the Smiths from markets on their travels punctuated every look. ‘Funny little things,’ according to Smith, that varied from shells to talismans and appeared as buttons, cuffs, and decoration on berets. In a playful self-referential nod, each model had a keyring hanging off their belt loop just like the designer.

Staged at Smith’s Italian HQ that had been transformed from office to catwalk for the occasion, the collection was an opportunity to bring people together in an intimate space that riffed off a traditional salon-style presentation in a home-away-from-home environment, said Smith.

‘It's lovely and simple, and so intimate here,’ he said. ‘I want people to be close enough to the clothes to really see them and [the details]. It’s good to make people look a bit closer and discover all the details.’

It also provided the chance for Smith to show in his beloved Italy, where he has owned a house since the 1990s. ‘I’ve always shown in Paris because when I started [in 1970], it was the only place I could hold a show and so I’ve always been loyal, ’ he said. ‘But we are very good friends with [this] country. There’s a positive spirit and it’s [the home of] the bella figura, right? They work to live rather than live to work. Which is a big difference here.’

The reception at Saturday’s show proved it was a choice worth making – and waiting for the designer swung down the steps to a rapturous reception. For S/S 2026 at Paul Smith, it seems timing is everything.

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