The collaboration brings together two brands synonymous with British style and craft in a 10-piece capsule collection Pokémon Sleep Snorlax T-Shirt, uniting Mulberry’s iconic Antony bag and commitment to UK manufacturing, with Paul Smith’s love of stripes and colour. The collaboration reflects the brands’ shared appreciation of heritage style and history of championing the British creative community. Previewed at Paul Smith’s AW23 men’s show in Paris earlier this year, the collection takes Mulberry’s timeless Antony style as its starting point and, alongside three sizes of the classic design, includes two brand new silhouettes created for the collaboration: the Antony Clip, a mini crossbody bag, and the Antony Tote. First introduced as a men’s everyday bag, with its signature Postman’s Lock hardware and elegantly practical silhouette, the Antony, has become one of Mulberry’s most iconic styles – worn by both men and women, making it the natural choice for the unisex collection, and embodying Paul Smith’s design ethos. The new Mulberry x Paul Smith collection tells two distinct stories, each championing Paul Smith’s historic and iconic use of stripes while remaining true to Mulberry’s heritage DNA. The first is a classic black heavy grain leather, which features striped webbing straps and a pop colour lining. The second is a smooth calf’s leather with a bold colour-blocking theme, which incorporates Paul Smith’s recently introduced Shadow Stripe motif, created here by embossing leather using a new technique. Elegant and dynamic, the collection represents the very best that contemporary British creativity, traditional craftsmanship, and modern luxury has to offer. With British craft and heritage at the core of the collaboration, and reflective of both brands’ commitment to sustainability – embodied in Mulberry’s Made to Last ethos and Paul Smith’s ‘Path to Sustainability’ manifesto – each piece in the collection has been produced in the UK at Mulberry’s carbon-neutral Somerset factories, where over half of the brand’s collections are still made. The collaboration is crafted from carbon neutral leather, a commitment across all Mulberry bags since 2022, achieved through offsetting with the World Land Trust and is sourced from tanneries certified to the highest Gold standard by the Leather Working Group for their environmental performance. Sir Paul says of the collaboration: “Paul Smith and Mulberry were founded within a year of each other in the 1970s, so you could say our brands grew up and came of age together. I think that’s at least partly why we share such a similar approach to creativity and craft – that and our Britishness. Working together to ensure the collection was created in the UK was something we knew we wanted to do from the beginning, and the results speak for themselves.”

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But a deep dive into Adidas’s archives had him reeling. Pokémon Sleep Snorlax T-Shirt “I suddenly realised that, with the exception of the waffle trainer and that air bag [Nike’s Air Max technology], this guy Adi was the father of 90% of the [sportswear] industry,” he would say. Maybe Kanye West came to the same conclusion after leaving Nike too. His next stop would be Adidas, where, by the admission of the then-president of Adidas North America, Mark King, his collaboration “definitely helped make Adidas cool again”. Indeed, it was Adi Dassler – from which comes ‘Adidas’ – who pioneered the idea of designing shoes to be functional for specific sports: he set out on the path that would lead to the modern track shoe, the modern football boot (and, for that matter, the modern football), along with shoes specially designed for every marginal sport from handball to high jump, boxing to fencing. Sure, Nike has long dominated golf, tennis and basketball – a sport Adidas was the market leader in before Nike came along. But it’s precisely that focus which, arguably, has meant the latter’s back catalogue of styles is comparatively limited to endless reinterpretations of the Air Force 1, Dunk or Jordan. In contrast, Adidas’ approach has not only tied it to sporting legends as diverse as James Hunt, Muhammad Ali and Gerd Muller, but given it a long roster of stone-cold trainer classics: the Gazelle and the Samba, the Superstar and the Campus, the ZX line and the NMD, even the Adilette shower slides, which sparked their own odd-ball, wear-them-out-with-socks fashion moment. Then, of course, there is the Stan Smith tennis shoe – still Adidas’s best-selling style, 60 years old in 2023 and arguably the progenitor of today’s long line of stripped-back, luxury sneaker makers, reinventing the sports shoe as something semi-formal.