LONDON — Paul Smith is again in Japan this week because the headline designer at Rakuten Trend Week Tokyo, exhibiting his fall 2025 males’s and girls’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 evening on the Tokyo Nationwide Museum, is a part of Rakuten’s “by R” venture, which goals to help the Japanese trend business.
Whereas he commonly visits Japan for work, Smith mentioned he hasn’t staged a present within the nation for greater than a decade, and he can’t look ahead to the second.
“We’re together with girls’s in addition to males’s, and there will probably be round 40 appears to be like 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 probably be reprising his menswear presentation, and including girls’s appears to be like, for a runway present in Tokyo on March 19.
Kuba Dabrowski/WWD
“Japan’s conventional flower is a chrysanthemum, however the different two stuff you see so much in Japan are the bonsai tree and the orchid. They’re very delicate and minimal, and so they undoubtedly match the Japanese aesthetic,” the designer mentioned in an interview shortly earlier than boarding the aircraft to Tokyo.
The autumn males’s assortment, which Smith offered 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 trend 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 can even be exhibiting his girls’s assortment, which he normally presents in a showroom, and the 23-piece Paul Smith Loves Barbour assortment, which includes 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 to be like on his Tokyo runway on March 19.
Courtesy of Paul Smith
Ryo Matsumura, senior vice chairman, managing government officer, commerce and advertising and marketing firm, at Rakuten Group, described Smith’s participation within the week as “such a pivotal second.”
He added: “We consider that partnering with world-class manufacturers is the important thing to boosting the Tokyo trend scene’s presence internationally, and we’re excited to see Paul Smith’s affect resonate globally, carrying Tokyo’s distinctive fashion with it. Going ahead, Rakuten Trend is dedicated to forging a fair stronger partnership with the model.”
Japan is sort of a second residence for Smith, whose longtime minority investor and licensing accomplice is Itochu Corp. Smith has 150 shops within the nation, and it’s his largest market outdoors of the U.Ok., producing 40 p.c of enterprise.
He’s typically greeted like a celeb, and clients love his cheeky humorousness, delicate 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 income.
“I used to be humbled to go to this place known as Japan, which in ’83 was a spot you didn’t suppose you’d ever go to in your life. Quite a lot of the designers who had been going there at the moment had very massive egos and really massive requests about chauffeur-driven vehicles 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 possibly 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 after they first partnered in 1984.
“They trusted me, and trusted the truth that I might open outlets and make them work,” mentioned Smith, including that Itochu, considered one of Japan’s largest normal buying and selling firms, by no means requested him to change his collections or aesthetic to go well with the Japanese client.
Along with the present, Smith plans to go to Kyoto to see his retailer there, and do a sequence of press appointments with the founding father of Niwaki, Jake Hobson. Niwaki, which affords specialist Japanese gardening instruments, is predicated within the U.Ok. with a retailer in London.
Paul Smith at Claridge’s resort 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 device 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 vegetation and flowers.