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Why the Visionary Designer Willi Smith Is More Relevant Than Ever
Smith built one of the most influential fashion brands of the 1980s. An exhibition illustrates the breadth of his talents—and the limits of how fashion is chronicled.
Willi Smith, c. 1981
In 1978, when submitting his biography to the Coty awards, a respected fashion prize, the designer Willi Smith, of WilliWear, wrote, “My mother and grandmother were always ladies of style and still are. I guess they taught me that you didn’t have to be rich to look good. I believe that good clothes don’t have to be expensive.” In appearance, if not price point, WilliWear then was all that fashion is now: sporty, casual, gender-neutral, a mash-up of “high” and “low” (though Smith would never have categorized culture, or life, in those terms), and replete with bold graphic prints and fine-art collaborations. Name your contemporary fashion icon—Kim Jones, Virgil Abloh, Supreme’s James Jebbia—and Smith foreshadowed them. WilliWear was also about more than clothes, as most fashion brands are now; Smith talked of wanting to revolutionize marketing, and he worked across architecture, film, art, and performance, collaborating with the likes of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, SITE, Keith Haring, and Barbara Kruger. He even considered starting a magazine, mocking up a few copies in the mid-1980s, preempting the current role brands have embraced as publishers, speaking to broad audiences of viewers and followers, rather than simply dedicated pools of clients.

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