Culture

A Thriving Digital Space for Willi Smith, Streetwear Genius


What’s a museum to do when it launches a show about a late genius of streetwear, and no one can walk up the street to see it? On March 13th, as the coronavirus swept through New York City, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum had to close the retrospective “Willi Smith: Street Couture” at the end of its opening day. Since then, though, the show’s Willi Smith Digital Community Archive, organized by the Web-design service Cargo into neighborhoods such as “Performance” and “Patterns,” has become a home for fashion flâneurs—a place where Smith’s friends and colleagues can swap memories during an evening in quarantine.

Willi Smith was born in Philadelphia in 1948, the quiet son of loving parents, who, he told Women’s Wear Daily, kept “more clothes in the house than food.” His grandmother cleaned houses for a family that was close to the designer Arnold Scaasi, and she helped her fashion-obsessed grandson secure an internship at the courtier’s house, where Smith assisted in designing outfits for Elizabeth Taylor. In 1965, Smith began a fashion program at the Parsons School of Design; two years later, according to the curator Alexandra Cunningham Cameron’s introduction to the exhibition’s catalogue, he was kicked out for dating another male student. Smith would soon prove, however, that he had no need for academic connections or credentials—or the closet.

He met Bethann Hardison, a young model who would become his longtime fit model and collaborator; her sporty style found expression in the blockbuster collections that Smith made, beginning in 1969, as the lead designer for Digits, which included the kind of voluminous yet flattering jumpsuits in creamy palettes that you can still spot on women from Joshua Tree to Ridgewood. Despite Smith’s success, Digits went bust, but he carried on under his own name, collaborating with dance troupes and Knoll International. WilliWear, launched with his business and creative partner Laurie Mallet, in 1976, “was a brand that you would see everyone wearing on the street,” Hardison tells the writer Jonathan Michael Square, in the show’s catalogue. “That’s why editors started referring to it as streetwear.” Smith seems to have preferred the loftier term “street couture,” but he brought a democratic flair to his creations, selling his patterns so that anyone could bring them to life, and packaging them with illustrations of both men and women sporting the same finished product. For Smith, gender was material to be played with, and so were the clothes themselves. “He always avoided identifying his audience, because at the time the fashion system was very siloed and segregated,” Cunningham Cameron told me. “He wanted to flip all that and say that if someone is wearing WilliWear, you don’t know what’s in their bank account. You don’t know where they’re coming from.”

From the beginning, Smith intersected with the art world as much as the fashion scene. After leaving Parsons, he befriended the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whom he assisted in fabricating “Wedding Dress,” a satin singlet with a rope-bound burden where a train should be. The trio would collaborate often, most notably for “Surrounded Islands,” in 1983, when the French pair wrapped islands in Miami’s Biscayne Bay in pink polypropylene—Smith whipped up matching uniforms in pink, long-sleeve cotton, which they then sold from a truck as souvenirs. (Cunningham Cameron found one of the uniforms in her parents’ garage and wears it with pride.) In 1984, Smith became the first designer to launch T-shirt collections with fine artists, including Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, and Futura. He also made inroads into Hollywood, designing the confections worn by the H.B.C.U. homecoming queens and their courts in Spike Lee’s “School Daze,” from 1988. Smith was, in short, everywhere, and everywhere was where his clothes made sense: at one’s desk, at a buzzy dinner table, at the bar afterward, even on the cruisy West Village piers that inspired the innovative showrooms and boutiques he designed with the postmodern architectural provocateurs SITE. “He wanted to create clothing that people could move in, in both a metaphorical and physical sense.” Cunningham Cameron said. In 1986, WilliWear grossed a cool twenty-five million dollars.

And then, in 1987, he was gone. Smith died of AIDS-related complications before his fortieth birthday. It’s a grim coincidence that the first institutional retrospective of a designer whose life was cut short by a pandemic was, itself, cut short by another pandemic. The online community archive offers hope and a sense of connection, though, by building on the legacy of previous hubs (such as the one attached to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Mary Quant show, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s community-curation activities). The archive honors the achievements of black queer artists like Smith, centers the contributions of the many women around him, and joyfully blurs the lines between scholarship, recollection, and gossip. In one submission, the makeup virtuoso Linda Mason describes coming up with the D.I.Y. looks for the models in Smith’s SUB-Urban show, in 1984: “I applied cream makeup colors to the palms of their hands, turquoise, green, yellow, red, and instructed them to smear it on their faces as they walked down the runway.” She also shares a photo of Smith in drag while on the set of “Expedition,” a satirical short, from 1986, in which a white man explores a fictional Africa. (The film, made to promote Smith’s spring 1986 collection, is streaming via the archive; it’s somehow both ahead of its time and deeply right now.)

The archive makes clear that Smith left a world that still holds his form, like fabric holds a shape. “Fashion is better because of him; retail environments as well,” the architect Jack Travis says. “I’m not sure how many truly realize this fact.” Vijay Agarwal, the manager of WilliWear’s Mumbai factory, offers the hilarious origin story of the famed “Bombay shorts,” one of Smith’s best-selling designs. Smith’s assistant, Elyn Rosenthal, reminds us that Smith once showed a collection to women who were incarcerated at Rikers Island. “A few of the inmates were our models, and when they came out there was a lot of excitement,” Rosenthal writes. Hardison tells a priceless story of convincing Smith to buy some work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the painter thanking her with a lifetime supply of weed. Elsewhere, everyone from Veronica Webb to Lynne Tillman offer their own WilliWear memories, to which I’ll add my own. On my first day of high school, in the early nineties, I wore a black WilliWear jacket with olive pinstripes, which I’d found at a discount store, over a Smiths T-shirt and beads. It gave my chubby body structure, my sissiness a letter of recommendation, and my Walkman somewhere to hide. High school didn’t go well for me, but what I’d give to still have that jacket.



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.