“Have you got enough legroom in the back?” asks Sir Paul Smith from the driver’s seat. Across from him, Holger Hampf, head of design at Mini, cracks down the window. Outside, the scenery is unusual: we are surrounded by an excited circle of Japanese fans, camera crews and automotive experts, all of them as enraptured by the car we are sitting in as by the designers in its front seats.
Worth around $119 billion in 2025, the Japanese car market is the world’s third largest. At the country’s biggest motor show in Tokyo last week, multiple headline-making new vehicles were announced by domestic superstar manufacturers including Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi and Nissan. Yet the only launch that attracted lines of selfie-seeking fans and prompted members of the audience to (very politely) cheer was that of the new Mini Paul Smith Edition.
While there is a long history of collaboration between the $4.6 trillion global automotive industry and the $300 billion luxury-fashion business, all past co-brandings have been essentially superficial. From the one-off Guccified Cadillacs of the 1970s to this year’s Fiat 500e Giorgio Armani edition, fashion-zhuzhed cars have only ever been available in limited runs.
This new Mini Paul Smith co-venture is much more substantial. Starting at just over £31,000 in the UK (but available globally), the cars in this “edition” come with a set of Smith-designed specifications, running from paintwork to upholstery via badging and trim. They can be applied to four models across Mini’s range, and the opportunity to choose them is presented at the point of purchase as a fully fledged and unlimited “Style” option for new Mini customers. Mini sells around 300,000 cars globally: from now on, the number co-branded to Paul Smith is limited only by how many buyers elect to tick that box.
Sir Paul, 79, first started visiting Japan to develop his label during the early 1980s. There are now around 160 Paul Smith stores in the country, all operated by his longtime partner and licensee Itochu, which also currently owns around 18% of the company. “When I first came here, in the early 80s, it was just extraordinary,” Smith recalls. “So many designers came to Japan and were disrespectful: they treated it as a quick way to make money. For me, it was: wow, Japan! It’s a privilege to be here. The appreciation has always been mutual, and I’ve always felt it.” When, in 1998, he was approached by Mini to create a special edition of 1,800 cars, his popularity in Japan meant that 1,500 of them were sold here. Many of them are still on the road today, and have more than doubled in value.
Twenty-six years later, Smith is once again big (in a Mini) in Japan. As we conduct this interview, Carpool Karaoke-style, he and Hampf showcase the new edition’s details. “This is knitted, recycled and recyclable,” Smith observes of the interior tech-jacquard fabric. “It’s imitating our stripe, what we call the shadow stripe, basically in just black. Then there’s the blue stitching on the leatherwork, the rabbit on the floor mats, the green mirrors — they’re just slightly off-colours, you know? Not typical automotive shades.”
For Mini’s Hampf, the collaboration marks an evolution in how automotive design can absorb external creative languages without losing credibility. “In a collaboration, both sides have to find themselves,” he says. “It cannot be that we push automotive design on Paul, or that we make a fashion statement that would be inauthentic. This is a very tasteful offering with some truth to it, and that, I think, is what matters most.”
Mini has been owned by BMW Group since 1994. At the turn of the millennium, it retired the Alec Issigonis-designed “classic” Mini, first launched in 1959, and in 2001 introduced the new, modernised Mini design. During 2024, BMW Group reported revenues of €142.38 billion. In the first nine months of 2025, BMW sales in Japan increased by 6%, while Mini sales rose 32%.
Both Mini and Paul Smith declined to detail the terms of their new collaboration. But as well as any fees or royalties flowing to Smith, his company will gain marketing exposure from featuring so prominently on tens of thousands of new, cool-looking Minis being driven across the world. Mini, meanwhile, benefits from association with a designer whose credentials extend well beyond the automotive arena: at a soft-launch event in Shibuya the night before the motor show, guests included editors, tastemakers and influencers from across Tokyo.
Clothes-makers and car-makers have long dabbled in combining outfits. Most recently, Ferrari has dedicated several seasons to establishing its Rocco Iannone-designed fashion collection at Milan Fashion Week, while Kering poached its newly appointed CEO, Luca de Meo, from the same role at Renault Group to steer it through luxury’s rocky patch and drive future growth.
As yet, however, there is no precedent for an automotive–fashion collaboration sparking a genuine sales surge on either side. BMW calls Mini “the world’s most exciting premium small-car brand”: if this Paul Smith edition — and its unlimited-sales approach — proves a success on BMW’s forecourts, that excitement might just spread to fashion too.
More from this author:
Maria Grazia Chiuri returns to Fendi as chief creative officer
‘A dose of poison against nostalgia’: First reactions to Duran Lantink’s Jean Paul Gaultier
Why Meryll Rogge’s appointment at Marni is one of fashion’s most exciting
