Willi Smith

Willi Donnell Smith was born on the twenty-ninth of February 1948 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Willie Lee Smith, an ironworker, and June Eileen Smith, a homemaker. He was raised in a Black Philadelphia household where, as he later recalled, every occasion called for an outfit — a mother who dressed with unabashed style and a father whose oversized silhouettes would echo in his own designs. After his parents parted, his grandmother Gladys Bush nurtured his gift, defending the hours he spent sketching and at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Smith won a scholarship to study fashion illustration at Parsons School of Design in New York and moved into the industry young, freelancing and designing for the sportswear house Digits before he was thirty. In 1976, with the businesswoman Laurie Mallet as president, he founded WilliWear Limited in New York, serving as its designer and vice-president. His vision was clear: affordable, natural-fiber, loosely tailored clothes drawn from the life of the street rather than the couture salon.

WilliWear grew from modest first-year sales into a house grossing roughly twenty-five million dollars by 1986. Smith called his approach clothing "for people who work" — democratic, comfortable, and joyful. In 1983 he received the Coty American Fashion Critics' Award, and he was widely regarded as one of the most successful African American designers of his era, a pioneer of what would later be understood as streetwear.

Willi Smith died in New York on the seventeenth of April 1987, at thirty-nine, of illness related to AIDS. In a single decade he reshaped how everyday people dressed and opened doors that had long been closed to designers who looked like him. His work is honored today in the archives and museums that keep his vision alive. May his name endure as long as the clothes he made were meant to be worn — freely, and by everyone.