WILLI SMITH’S fans loved the groundbreaking garments he made in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact, they loved them to bits. “People wore out their WilliWear,” explains Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, curator of the first major show of his work, “Willi Smith: Street Couture”, at the Cooper Hewitt museum in New York, which has just reopened after a covid-induced delay. The paucity of pieces in circulation may be one of the reasons it has taken so long for Smith to get the acclaim he deserves.
His influence is unquestionable. During a 20-year career, particularly as boss of his own clothing line, WilliWear Ltd (co-founded with Laurie Mallet in 1976), Smith defied the fashion industry’s elitism to pioneer what he called “street couture”: affordable, versatile attire inspired by the needs and whims of ordinary folk. “I don’t design clothes for the queen,” he said, “but for the people who wave at her as she goes by.” Some of the ideas he helped generate, such as clothes simple and chic enough to wear to both an office and a dance-club, or gender-neutral styles that appealed to both men and women, have since entered the mainstream.
It is odd, then, that posterity has overlooked him. Ms Cunningham Cameron suggests this may also be because the fashion canon tends to celebrate white, Eurocentric designers who craft what are essentially status objects for the rich. Smith was black, self-made and irreverent towards the industry’s conventions. Yet when he died of complications related to AIDS in 1987, aged 39, his clothes were stocked in more than 1,100 shops around the world.
Growing up in working-class Philadelphia, Smith learned from his mother and grandmother that stylish did not have to mean expensive. In the mid-1960s, when he was an intern for Arnold Scaasi, a couturier to the likes of Brooke Astor and Elizabeth Taylor, Smith got what he called a crash course in “the clothes I didn’t want to make”. As a rising star in sportswear, he saw a need for pieces that were smart yet practical, and which worked for a variety of body types, seasons and situations. “People really only need a few clothes,” he told Women’s Wear Daily in 1972. After he launched WilliWear, he made his pieces as widely available as possible by holding down prices and selling his patterns to people who sewed their clothes at home.
His runway shows were performance-art events in lofts, theatres and galleries, featuring a diverse array of dancers as models and, on occasion, the video art of Juan Downey and Nam June Paik. Caught on film, these playful events contrast refreshingly with the staid march of emaciated automatons typical of fashion shows today. And he often collaborated with artists, graphic designers and choreographers to present his clothing in unexpected ways.
For example, Smith asked 20 contemporary artists, including Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and Robert Rauschenberg, to devise designs for T-shirts. The results, priced at $37 each, first appeared at a downtown gallery in 1984; they marked the first partnership between artists and a fashion label for industrially produced clothes. Just as Smith sensed people were intimidated by fashion, he noticed many were daunted by art museums. “This way we are bringing the artist closer to the people,” he explained. “It’s really street art.”
“Willi Smith: Street Couture” continues at the Cooper Hewitt, New York, until October 24th