The Mini Paul Smith Edition brings the designer and the car brand together once again

Sir Paul Smith and Mini seem to ‘get on’. Their relationship stretches back to 1998 when the former collaborated with the latter to create a small 1800-unit production run of the original Mini car with some subtle exterior and interior tweaks.

Only officially sold in the UK and Japan they now unsurprisingly hold their value better than regular Minis from the same era. There was also a one-off Paul Smith Mini in 1999 painted in the designer’s signature stripe to celebrate 40 years of the launch of the very first one in 1959.

More recently the 2021 Strip concept suggested how a Mini Cooper’s interior colour, materials and finish could be radically reinterpreted and then in late 2025 a full production Mini Paul Smith Edition – based on the Cooper range – was launched in Japan, with deliveries due worldwide in Spring 2026 from £32,705.

Wallpaper* had an exclusive chat with the affable British designer in Tokyo after the launch to find out more about his latest Mini project and his views on colour, materials and finish.

Wallpaper*: There are exceptions, but many car x fashion collaborations seem quite bad. Why did you think you could do better?

Paul Smith: I’ve seen ones where the designer literally just puts their name on the car and maybe one red line. I was determined not to do that. It would be embarrassing. But with a job like this, you can’t do a different sort of car because you inherit the car that’s there. So first of all, you’ve got to like the car, which I do. Then you think, ‘what can I do?’

W*: Was it always part of the plan to release a Mini x Paul Smith production car after the 2021 Strip concept?

PS: Honestly, I can’t remember, but I’ve always kept in touch with Mini. You can misbehave a bit with concept cars but to do a production car is very exciting.

W*: Where do you think your unusual sense of colour comes from?

PS: I sometimes underestimate the importance of my wife. She studied fashion and couture originally, but then as a mature student went to the Slade School of Art and painted.

So a lot of our weekends are spent looking at Caravaggio, Cezanne or diverse renaissance work and when you look at those masters of painting and see some of the colours they put together, they’re magical. You think, ‘I’d never imagine those two colours together’. I think the grey with the green on the Mini Paul Smith Edition looks interesting.

W*: Do you subscribe to colour theory?

PS: Definitely not. Often people ask whether I look at colour predictions and things like that? And I say, ‘No, hopefully I give them.’ But I did a project with the Anni Albers Foundation for the Tate Modern that was fantastic and when I was in my early twenties, I worked as a colourist for Benetton.

W*: And what about materials?

PS: We still work with yarn a lot, whereas nearly every design company now just does colour on the computer. We take yarn and wrap it around a card and get the stripes and put colours together, because what people forget about clothes is that yarn is three-dimensional, so the colours reflect on each other.

W*: What other aspects do you consider?

PS: I feel passionate about texture and getting people to think about it. My office is a big maze of stuff. In there, you’ll see small and big, rough and smooth and shadows. That ‘rough and smooth’ can be a Harris tweed with a silk shirt. In a car, you can have rough and smooth too, but it’s rarely there.

W*: Do you hit payday if Mini sells a certain number of these cars?

PS: I’m the one that should know, but I never know. Honestly, it always starts with whether I’m interested in doing something. I get offered a lot of collaborations and sometimes the first thing people talk about is the money. That’s a put-off for me immediately, because it’s normally the wrong job. To do a good job you’ve just got to want to do it.

Mini Paul Smith Edition, from £31,205, Mini.co.uk, @Mini

PaulSmith.com, @PaulSmithDesign