7928/20869
Posh shirt manufacturer Paul Smith emailed me at 8am today - good to see with all that money Paul is still at work sending out personalised emails so early. If he starts work at 8am then I was the first person he emailed, which is flattering.
I've bought a few clothes from Paul over the years, mainly for stage and TV appearances (so not too many for that). The clothes are good, but expensive and I haven't bought anything for a while (due to lack of TV appearances), but for a while I was dressed head to toe in Paul Smith and that's why he wants my custom.
The subject line of the email was "You can never have too many shirts."
Now, however much you like shirts, that is clearly not true. You can definitely have too many shirts. Clearly 100,000 shirts would be too many shirts. I've got about 20 shirts (maybe 40 if you include t shirts and running tops, though I don't think Paul is including those) and that's definitely enough. I've only got that many as I need two sets of shirts - some for when I fat and some for when I am relatively thin. I'd say even for the most shirt loving person who only likes to wash their shirts every month or so, 100 shirts is definitely enough. Any more is impractical both for storage and for time taken to choose a shirt in the morning,
If you can never have too many shirts then why is Paul Smith attempting to sell so many of his? He is caught trapped in his own lie.
Steve Cromwell on Twitter calculated that if you wore a different shirt every day for 70 years you'd need only 25,500 shirts (though that doesn't take into account the fact that you might spill something on the shirt and need to change - I can't get through the day any more without my shirt looking like a Jackson Pollock painting covered in food and bodily fluids, which is why I tend to wear cheap T-shirts and not Paul Smith shirts), but even if you were Elton John and had to throw all you shirts away once worn, then 50,000 should do you and I'd suggest you don't buy all those in one go, just in case you can get two days wear out of a shirt, but also because your size might change over time. You still don't need any more than 50 at any given point. If you're buying that many then Paul Smith will probably post you one daily with free postage. Or two in case you spill stuff down yourself. Or three if you're over 55 and spill stuff down yourself every meal.
Whatever Paul Smith says he is wrong. You can definitely have too many shirts. I still feel he needs convincing, so what if you had so many shirts that they filled every room in your house so you couldn't even get in, so you could only actually wear the shirts that you could reach from the front door (if you could even open your front door)- would that be too many shirts?
What if you owned every single shirt on the planet and bought up any more that were being made, so you were the only one with shirts and everyone else had to go topless or wear jumpers or coats?
It would be too many shirts and I'd suggest you'd get to a point where there were so many shirts that all life on earth would be smothered out of existence, or anything managing to live atop the shirts would only be able to eat other people who hadn't been smothered, or shirts. It would be too many shirts for you.
I tried to contact Paul Smith for comment, but he's staying very quiet. I fear he has some kind of ulterior motive in wanting you to buy ever more shirts.
Some more impossibly exciting things added to ebay today including my Rod Hull RHLSTP notebook (with timkey script) and a rejection letter from Little and Large for Lee and Herring (which should really be in a museum).
Bid here. All money goes towards making more podcasts!
