By MARY BILLARD
The fashion designer Paul Smith’s 11th and 12th London stores offer the yin and yang of shopping experiences.
In the quiet and expensive Mayfair neighborhood, his antiques store sells museum-quality furniture; the Borough Market store, next to a lively weekend food fair, offers everything from surfing T-shirts to wind-up egg-laying hens made of tin.
Not to say that the Mayfair store is a hushed reverential shrine to fine furniture. A playful Austin Powers-esque Rotating Drinks Cabinet from the 1960’s was recently displayed (at the serious price of £4,600, or $8,320, at $1.81 to the pound). When the Mayfair store first opened six months ago, the initial offerings were from Sir Paul’s private warehouse stash. Now a longtime friend with a similar esthetic, Nick Chandor, is out shopping the world.
“I still have my day job. Twenty-six lines per year,” said Sir Paul.
On a recent Saturday, after showing two visitors around his Mayfair shop (enthusiastically pointing out the craftsmanship in a Willie Rizzo granite-topped table from the 1970’s), Sir Paul jumped into his Mini Cooper and drove them across town to his Borough Market store, which opened in January. As he neared the store, Sir Paul, wearing a tailored gray suit and floral shirt, spotted a man carrying his trademark striped shopping bag. “Fantastic! Someone bought something!,” said the man whose company grossed £250 million last year.
The bright green storefront, the setting for the gang headquarters in Guy Ritchie’s movie, “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels,” offers such items as T-shirts, books, sneakers, vintage robots, 1980’s boomboxes and souvenir plates from Olympics long past. (The wind-up hens are £2; the boomboxes start at £250.)
Some goods are clustered in lacquered cabinets from India that were purchased on what Sir Paul off-handedly calls his “day trips.” Not to Brighton, but to Delhi or Saigon or China. The challenging logistics of a tightly choreographed trip appeals to him, and with his schedule, that is sometimes all he can fit in.
“I loved sitting on the Great Wall, the wind whipping around me,” he said.
Paul Smith 9 Albermarle, the antiques store, is located, unsurprisingly, at 9 Albemarle Street, W1S 4BL; 44-20-7493-4565; Paul Smith at Borough Market is at 13 Park Street, SE1 9AB; 44-20-7403-1678.
