Simon Carter

Classic-car enthusiast and croquet player Simon Carter is a man with a passion for the past, who finds his clothes in skips. So how did he end up running a funky menswear business? Richard Cree finds out

Simon Carter is doing what he does best. He may be known as the “king of cufflinks”, but what he’s really good at has nothing to do with accessory design. What he does best is tell a funny story. Whether the joke’s on himself, me, his PR, the waiter or a bunch of people he met some time ago, he loves to wind people up.

Ensconced in a comfortable booth at his favourite restaurant—the resolutely old-school Simpson’s-in-the-Strand—tucking into a huge portion of steak and kidney pudding, he delights in telling me how he managed to convince US businessmen that black pudding in Simpson’s signature “10 Deadly Sins” breakfast was originally made from soot, flour and water, “because that’s all the poor folk in the north could afford”. He lets out an appreciative gurgle of a laugh, savouring the memory of a stitch-up job well done and imagining the Americans returning home to pass on the strange eating habits of the “quaint Brits”.

But then you can hardly blame the Americans for believing Carter. Thanks to an addiction for collecting all kinds of old stuff—some of it antique, some just plain old—he appears to have wisdom and knowledge beyond his 45 years. In the space of one lunchtime, he holds forth on antique English glassware (he is a passionate collector of Whitefriars), old Bakelite radios, historic British motorcycles and classic cars, and the history of British tailoring and croquet. As a general rule, the older and the quirkier something is, the more interesting it is to Carter.

As if to prove this, he launches into the story of a recently acquired coat. “It was pulled off a skip in Thornton Heath. I was driving past, when I spotted something leather on this skip. So I stopped and hauled off this pre-war, full-length, brown motorcycling trenchcoat. I hung it up for a week to dry, then got out the shoe polish and went over the whole coat, and it’s completely and utterly immaculate and completely my size and virtually unworn. The style is just so cool. I can’t begin to tell you what a buzz that gave me.” This fascination for vintage clothing goes back a long way and is pretty much how he got into business in the first place. In the early 1980s, he came to London with the intention of studying medicine at Chelsea Hospital.

“I was doing immunology,” he says, relaxing into his role as a natural storyteller. “But the real revelation was the King’s Road. Coming from Essex, I had never realised there was more to clothing than Millets. This was 1981 and it was the best time to be on the King’s Road. It was the tail end of punk and the start of the ‘new romantic’ era. I had a small business buying vintage clothes at jumble sales and selling them to this shop on the King’s Road called Eat Your Heart Out. I started working there one day a week. I was also into British motorcycles and when someone brought in this vintage motorcycle brooch from the 1930s, I took it in lieu of a day’s wages and wore it. This was the 1980s, and men could wear brooches with pride.”

The reaction he got to the brooch encouraged Carter to get 100 made. “I started at one end of the King’s Road with my 1980s Gladstone bag full of brooches and by the time I’d got to Sloane Square I hadn’t sold a single one. It had been a complete, unmitigated disaster. It was raining and I was soaked. It was a rags to tatters story. I was very miserable and wondering how many people I could give a brooch to for Christmas. Then I passed the jewellery shop Cobra & Bellamy. As I had nothing to lose, I went in. After picking over them, they agreed to take 50, and that was the turning point.”

The next shop took some because Cobra & Bellamy had, and Simon Carter’s business was born. After a brief spell as a buyer at Fenwicks, Carter eventually took the plunge—against the advice of his parents, who didn’t want him to give up his day job—and threw himself into launching the Simon Carter brand, with an emphasis on brooches, cufflinks (hence the soubriquet “king of cufflinks”), wallets and watches.

Gradually, the brand expanded through shirts and ties into menswear and now offers a full range of formal and casual clothing. His suits are worn by the likes of Will Smith, Jonathan Ross and members of Duran Duran, and are stocked in most major department stores. In addition, they’re available from an expanding empire of standalone shops, including one in Toronto and a brand new Simon Carter flagship in London’s Covent Garden.

In his gently self-mocking way, Carter explains that his inspiration has been that most English of designers, Sir Paul Smith. “Paul Smith is like a role model for me. In fact, if I can’t decide whether or not to do something I’ll often ask ‘would Paul Smith do this’ or ‘what would Sir Paul do’?”

Whatever he does, Carter makes good use of his sense of humour and the quirky eccentricity that defines most English brands. “There is an intangible ‘Englishness’ that runs through our products, which is hard to quantify. Whether it’s the look or the quality or the humour, there is something about it that says it is English. It definitely isn’t Italian. There’s often a lot of humour in what we do and a lot of it is hidden,” he says.

By way of example, he takes out his wallet and shows me the lining, in which a re-written 1960s comic strip tells the story of an evil villain who is half-man and half turkey and is trying to steal the secrets of the Simon Carter suit. Likewise, anyone who’s shopped in Simon Carter will remember the tag attached to every item of clothing that tells a story about Gervais, Carter’s imaginary dog.

But despite his burgeoning business empire and a growing brand reputation, Carter hasn’t shaken off the feeling that his life is a series of compromises. “I don’t see myself as a designer or a retailer or an entrepreneur. I see myself as doing bits of those things in a slightly compromised way. The one thing I’m not compromising on is my ability to compromise. I am probably not the best businessman in the world, but I am a good businessman. I am probably not the best designer in the world, but I am quite a good designer. I am probably not the best croquet player in the world, but I am nearly.”

At which point it seems only polite to ask about the origins of his passion for a game—sorry, sport—seen by many as the leisurely pursuit of dandies and aristocrats. Think of the rollicking that John Prescott got from the press when he was seen messing about with hoops and mallet.

Carter is unflinching in his support of croquet. It’s a game he grew up with and returned to 12 years ago. He says it all started when his parents bought a croquet set at an auction when he was about eight. “They set it up on the back lawn, so I was brought up with croquet. Then about 12 years ago, I discovered a small club at Sydenham and got back into playing. This was more social than competitive. But then I joined Dulwich, which is highly competitive.”

There Carter began to climb what he jokingly refers to as “the greasy mallet of club and county play”, finally earning his world ranking last year. He is currently ranked 24 in the world golf croquet championships. And the word golf is instructive. There are two main types of croquet; the more formal association croquet, a game which might last for several hours, and what Carter describes as “the more dynamic” golf croquet. The key difference is that in golf croquet all players are on court at the same time and each hoop is played by all players at once. Once a player has won a hoop, all players then move on to the next hoop. Players are awarded one point for each hoop and at the end, the player with the most points wins.

The Croquet Association appears to be a little sniffy about golf croquet, describing it as “draughts” to association croquet’s “chess”.
When I put this to Carter he shrugs it off. “Golf croquet is much more sociable. And it’s faster, so a game is over in 40 minutes as opposed to the three-and-a-half hours for association. But I also like the drama of the jump shot, which isn’t really played in association croquet.” Rather than chess and draughts, he prefers the analogy of snooker and billiards.

But even allowing for the fact that golf is the more dynamic version of the game, it’s difficult to square the croquet-playing Carter—or Carter the antique glass collector, for that matter—with the funky, colourful menswear brand. As he himself admits, he occasionally sounds like an old lady. Just get him talking about the benefits of salvaging antiques or old clothes from jumble sales. “I enjoy being resourceful. I get it from my parents. They were brought up in the shadow of the war when there wasn’t very much around and so you made do and mended and you didn’t waste anything and you ate all the food on your plate. If you wanted something you saved up for it. Of course, it all sounds hideously old-fashioned and it sounds like I’m 107 years old.”

But that’s nothing compared with his views on technology. “I hate technology,” he says, before adding “but I accept that I need it.” Then, with typical Carter contrariness, he claims to have been a ludicrously early adopter of the mobile phone. “I was the first person I know to get one. I got it in 1989. It was the cheapest one that would fit into your pocket; the list price was £1,750, but I paid £1,000 in cash. I used to go into shops and it would ring and people would stand there open-mouthed. They had never seen one.”

His main gripe with technology seems to be how disposable it is, coupled with a lack of reliability that Carter points out we don’t accept elsewhere. “I am notorious for throwing electrical equipment out of windows and smashing computer keyboards. But we have extraordinarily low expectations of this stuff. If you spent the same money on a washing machine and it just didn’t work sometimes or it leaked or packed up, you wouldn’t just say, ‘oh well, it does that sometimes’, you’d take it back to the shop and get it fixed or get your money back. And yet with computers we just accept it. There’s some global conspiracy going on here because this stuff is absolutely rubbish, and it annoys me. We are getting a very raw deal with this stuff. And as far as I can see, it doesn’t matter how much you spend on it.”

And with that, Carter heads off through the London traffic. He’s left his sexy, red Aston Martin DB6 at home and is in his bright pea-green Austin Princess 1300 Vanden Plas—the perfect car for an old lady. Would Sir Paul Smith do that?