Willi Smith was born in 1948 in Philadelphia. He studied at Parsons School of Design, designed for Digits and Bobbie Brooks in the early 1970s, and launched WilliWear Ltd. with his business partner Laurie Mallet in 1976. By 1986 the company had revenue of USD 25 million — the largest Black-owned American fashion label of the decade.

The Streetwear Argument

Smith named his category — before the term existed elsewhere — in a 1983 Vogue interview: "I don't design clothes for the Queen, but for the people who wave at her as she goes by. I design for the real people. I call it streetwear." The collections were cut-loose, dyed in flat primary colours, and priced for working wardrobes. His 1984 spring collection wholesaled at between USD 30 and USD 100 per piece.

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Clothes should be affordable. If you can't afford the clothes, then the designer is the problem, not you. — Willi Smith

The Collaborations

Smith's most unusual contribution was to commission, at the height of his commercial success, a series of conceptual collaborations with artists: Christo wrapped a WilliWear store on West Fifth Avenue in white fabric (1985); Dan Graham installed a video mirror inside; Spike Lee shot a ten-minute short film, WilliWear 1986, as an advertising campaign. Nam June Paik produced a runway video. The collaborations, now held at the Cooper Hewitt archives, constitute the fullest artist-fashion-house collaborative documentation of the pre-internet era.

The Death

Smith died of AIDS-related pneumonia in New York on 17 April 1987, at 39 — three years before Patrick Kelly, in the same epidemic. The company collapsed within eighteen months. The Cooper Hewitt's 2020 exhibition Willi Smith: Street Couture was the first museum retrospective of his work. His name is the namesake of the term that has, since 1984, described the single most commercially important category of twenty-first-century fashion.