Dear Paul: Letters to myself in my first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth decades…

0-9 years (1946-55)

It’s hard to know what say to you at this age, because I feel I barely know you. Unlike most people, who remember things like Christmas trees and birthday parties, for me those early childhood years are a complete blank. I know you’re secure and happy, thanks not least to your mother’s calm temperament, but it feels like a childhood without punctuation marks. You were born 11 years after your brother and eight years after your sister. When you’re old enough to realise that, you may find yourself wondering if you were a bit of an afterthought, or even an accident – “a gift from God,” as your mother used to say when the subject came up. Because of it, you might find your parents giving you less attention than they gave to your siblings, because they’ve been through it twice already. You’ll get quite a lot of toys handed down from your brother, including a little garage with petrol pumps, made by your father. It has a sign saying “PAUL’S GARAGE”, but if you peel it away, you’ll see it covers the original sign, which said BRIAN’S GARAGE – Brian being your brother. But don’t resent that. Take it as an early lesson in the value of recycling.

10-19 (1956-65)

Now you’re old enough to climb up into the tree house that your father built for your brother and sister in your garden in a Nottingham suburb. You can watch your father making and repairing things in his workshop, and pursuing his hobby of amateur photography in the darkroom he’s built in the loft. When you’re 11 years old, you’ll be given two things that will change your life. The first is a proper camera, which you’ll learn to use at the local camera club and through which you’ll start appreciating how to look at things, how to frame the world. The second is a racing bike, on which you’ll have dreams of winning the Tour de France. During your first foreign holiday, a youth-club trip to Italy, you’ll be impressed by how good the local teenagers look, and you’ll bring back some stylish stuff to wear on your bike. A bad accident at the age of 17 will put an end to those cycling ambitions, but three months in a hospital ward will show you that you can use your sense of humour to entertain your fellow patients. You’ll go back to the job you’ve already started, in a clothing warehouse, but then, quite unexpectedly, you’ll meet a bunch of art students who’ll show you a side of life that will shape your future.

20-29 (1966-75)

At 20, you’ll leave the warehouse. One of those art students you met is starting a boutique in the centre of Nottingham. It’s called Birdcage, and she asks you to run the menswear department. Now you’re in the middle of that great explosion of fun and creativity known as the ’60s. There’s creativity in the clothes, of course, but also in the music, the films, the pop-art paintings. Don’t hold back from soaking it all up. And on the evening of your 21^st birthday, while celebrating in a bar with your friends, you’ll meet the woman from London who’ll change your life. Her name is Pauline Denyer, and she teaches at the art college. Before long, you’re living together and she’ll be showing you all the things she learned while studying fashion at the Royal College of Art. Very quickly you’ll come to recognise that she has extremely high standards in everything from cloth and cut to buttonholes and linings. When she takes her students to Paris to attend the couture collections, you’ll go with her to see the work of Chanel, Balenciaga, Balmain, Patou and Yves Saint Laurent in close quarters. Pauline will encourage you to leave Birdcage and open a shop with your own name over the door. Her standards will become your standards. So pay attention.

30-39 (1976-85)

That first shop, in a tiny room off an alley in Nottingham, teaches you a lot about how to get people to help you. You persuaded the landlord to let you have the room for a small rent. Your father and brother helped you transform it into a shop. You found ways of drawing attention to something slightly out of the way. In the early years, you open it only on Fridays and Saturdays. The rest of the week you’ll spend working as a freelance stylist and consultant to earn the money to keep it going, while making important contacts. You’ll also be travelling the country to find factories willing to manufacture the clothes you’re designing in the small quantities you need. That’s where you’ll be grateful for having inherited your father’s gift for using your sense of humour to break the ice with strangers. But gradually people start travelling to your shop from other towns, realising that there’s something special going on, and orders for your clothes come in from around the world. When you open your first London shop, in 1979, it’s in Covent Garden, then still awaiting its transformation into a new hub of cultural activity. So that’s a risk. But be patient. Although it’ll take time, eventually your customers will include Richard Rogers, Ridley Scott, Jack Nicholson and David Bowie.

40-49 (1986-95)

You’ll spend a lot of your forties travelling to and from Japan, where a first visit has laid the foundation for relationships that will become very important to your business. At the beginning, it was all very strange to you. But unlike other designers from Britain, who go there briefly and never return, incorrectly thinking that one visit is enough to ensure their success, you stick at it, going back many times and meeting the Japanese on their own terms. You’ll feel an affinity for many of their values, particularly things like politeness and punctuality. Again, you’ll use humour to overcome the language barrier. You’ll make the effort to understand what it is they like about what you do, and how you can sustain their interest through opening your own shops, eventually more than 200 of them, sending old mahogany shop-fittings and oil paintings from England by ship in order to create the right environment. You mustn’t be too proud to recognise that they also have things to teach you, particularly when it comes to how people are treated. Regular meetings to keep your staff informed about new lines and an insistence on showing courtesy towards your customers will come naturally to you, but their importance will be re-emphasised by what you’ve observed on your many trips to Japan.

50-59 (1996-2005)

You’ll discover that your early training in how to make good suits, first through lessons from Pauline and then on a City & Guilds evening course run by a man with a background in military tailoring, puts you in a very good position when suits come back into fashion for young men. That happens partly as a result of Big Bang in the City of London – which puts many young bankers and traders on high salaries – and partly through the influence of people such as David Bowie, who’ll become a friend after paying an unannounced visit to the Covent Garden shop one day. Along with the success of the Paul Smith suit, you’ll use your instincts to revive the wearing of boxer shorts, which you’ve seen on a visit to New York but which, after finding a suitable manufacturer in Manchester, you’ll have made in a slimmer, more comfortable style. And there will be socks, of course – in every colour and pattern imaginable. Eventually, you’ll be selling 700,000 pairs a year. For a while, too, there’ll be the success of the Filofax, a personal organiser in a leather cover. It’s still an obscure product when Pauline buys you one from a stationery shop in Covent Garden. You’ll like it so much that you contact the manufacturers, who will be astonished when you go on to sell something like 17,000 of them, before the smartphone renders them obsolete.

60-69 (2006-15)

Trust your instincts, particularly when it comes to opening new shops. Choose interesting locations – not always the obvious ones – and don’t design them according to a template. Each shop needs to have its own personality. All your shops around the world are important to you, and one of the latest, at 8821 Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles, is a good example of the way you let your imagination lead you in interesting directions, while learning from all the work you’ve put in over the years. The first Paul Smith shop in London caused a stir because it was very minimalist, very monochrome, very modern. The second, next door to it, went in the opposite direction, with wooden shelves and cupboards from a Victorian pharmacy. Now your company has an entire department devoted to working on the design of new shops. When you decide to open one in LA you find an old picture framer’s workshop in West Hollywood. You want to do something different, so you look for inspiration to one of your favourite architects, the Mexican genius Luis Barragán, who knew how to use bright colours in a sunlit landscape. You turn the building into a big bright pink shoebox with only one small window, and it becomes LA’s most Instagrammed building. Always stay true to that love of the unconventional.

70-80 (2016-26)

There will be hard times, particularly once the damaging effects of Brexit become clear and the Covid lockdown arrives to interrupt your company’s 50^th anniversary in 2020. But while you’re fighting for the company’s survival, just look around you. You’ve always taken pleasure in filling the walls and stairways of your shops and offices with interesting pieces of visual art, whether they’re paintings or photographs or framed letters and drawings from people who got in touch simply because they like what Paul Smith represents. You’ve always enjoyed collecting things, too, and your top-floor office in the company London headquarters is filled with miscellaneous stuff: paintings, toys, bikes of all kinds, historic cycling jerseys, books about art and photography, and the little rabbits that Pauline started sending you for luck and which now arrive constantly from people around the world. Several visitors have taken one look at the room and suggested that it resembles the inside of your head. Maybe it does. But it’s also somehow symbolic of an attitude running through the company, a sign of its independence from the corporate world and of the determination, in an increasingly homogenised world, not to become like everyone else. In the difficult moments, let that thought make you happy.

THREADS: MY LIFE IN STYLE by Paul Smith is published on 10 September (Macmillan hardback, £25)