In Praise Of: Paul Smith

Paul Smith's Credit Crunch Bag is one of the only things to make me laugh about the whole money mayhem thing that's kicked off in the last few months.

As well as hating the hideous meaningless phrase and its damn continued usage, the way the media turned everything into awful alliterative jargon really drove me mad a few months ago.

When people at work started talking about writing a Credit Crunch Chirstmas page, I was most unimpressed.

Maybe because everyone's moved on, and are just happier to use the word recession and get over it, I feel I can now post a piccy of this bag without just totally seeming to jump on a bandwagon.

Plus, Paul Smith's great. I'm not saying I want to go out and buy all his clothes (JC's birthday cardigan was a pretty special one-off), but I do think there's something nice about the bloke. I've wandered dreamily around the shops, seen him on TV, and he always seems pretty damn cool.

See this:

I was sitting in my office one day and jotting down some thoughts about life - and then I just left them on my notebook and someone from the team came in and saw them - and the next thing I knew they were framed and on the wall. Then the New York team requested them because they wanted them on the wall of the New York shop...

SOME THOUGHTS
by Paul Smith

• Start something new
• Take pleasure seriously
• Work is not about shorter hours or longer hours, it's about every hour
• Look at the world through the eyes of someone you respect, admire and love
• You can't do it without doing it
• Make room to break the rules
• Stop making sense... Logic is predicatable... Think differently
  

I spotted all this stuff on the Vogue website, somewhere you wouldn't normally think I'd go getting inspiration.

I get the Vogue daily updates for work purposes (they're great for London's Shopping News), and once you've sifted through some of the useless millionaire daughter designs duffelcoat stories, and the sad grand old designer-you've-never-heard-of dies posting, they sometimes have some real gems on there.

Today's story about P Diddy made me laugh too.