Chapter 1The Erasure

Foreword

On the thirteenth of March, 2020, the Cooper Hewitt opened the first major retrospective of Willi Smith's work, thirty-three years after his death. Within days the museum closed its doors, along with every other cultural institution in New York, and the exhibition sat sealed inside the Carnegie Mansion while a new epidemic moved through the city outside.

I have never encountered a more exact accident. A recovery that had taken three decades to assemble was locked in a dark building by a second plague, one whose dead were being counted and named in real time in a way that the dead of the first one never were. The show eventually reopened and ran into October of 2021. Very few people saw it. The catalog is excellent and it is a catalog, which is to say it is organized around objects, around what was made rather than around who made it and what it cost him.

That is the gap this book was written into.

My work until now has been about women: designers and creative directors whose names came off their own clothes, who were credited as muses to the men they had trained, who built houses that were later described as having been founded by someone else. I know the shape of that machinery well. I thought I had seen its most complete form. I had not. What happened to Willi Smith is not miscrediting. It is absence. He was not written into the record wrongly. He was not written in.

Here is what was left out. He was born in Philadelphia on the twenty-ninth of February, 1948, the son of an ironworker and a domestic worker. He won a scholarship to Parsons at seventeen and left before he graduated. In 1976, with his sister Toukie and a businessman named Laurie Mallet, he founded a company called WilliWear. Within a decade it was grossing more than twenty-five million dollars a year, which made it the most commercially successful Black-owned fashion company in the United States and one of the most successful independent labels of any kind in America. He designed the homecoming-court costumes for Spike Lee's School Daze. He made the uniforms worn by the workers who wrapped the Pont Neuf for Christo and Jeanne-Claude. He put Keith Haring's drawings on shirts that people could actually buy. In 1986 he received a lifetime achievement award. On the seventeenth of April, 1987, he died of complications from AIDS. He was thirty-nine. Within five years he was gone from the record.

Set that beside two other names. Halston died of AIDS in 1990 and has a biography, a documentary and a Netflix miniseries. Perry Ellis died in 1986, a year before Smith, of an illness the industry understood and declined to name, and his name is still on a brand. Same industry, same decade, same disease. The variable that differs is not talent and it is not revenue.

I want to be careful here, because a book like this can slide into a single accusation and become smaller than its subject. The forgetting of Willi Smith was not one thing. It was race, and it was the stigma attached to how he died, and it was the collapse of WilliWear in 1990, which meant no surviving institution had a commercial interest in maintaining the name. And it was class, which I had underrated before I started and which I now think is the most quietly effective of the four. Smith's clothes were priced for people who wanted to look good without pretending to be rich. A press that has always been more comfortable with exclusivity than with democracy covered him warmly and never revered him, because reverence was reserved for clothes that functioned as status. He was not undersold. He was misfiled.

None of it required a decision. That is the part I would ask you to hold on to. It required only an accumulation of ordinary choices, each defensible on its own: the editor who does not think of him because his name is not in the record she inherited, the professor who teaches the canon in the textbook, the curator who acquires by scholarly consensus, the journalist writing the origins of streetwear from the sources she can find. Each link is reasonable. The chain is an erasure. When historians date the birth of streetwear to a surf company in the mid-1980s or to downtown skate culture in the early 1990s, they are describing something Willi Smith had been doing for most of a decade already.

Two things this book is not.

It is not a martyrology. He is not only acted upon in these pages. He was a working designer with a philosophy he could articulate and a company he ran, and he made choices, including commercial ones, that a martyr narrative would have to flatten. The most interesting thing about him is not that he was wronged. It is that he was right about where fashion was going, forty years early, and built a profitable business on being right, and the industry took the idea and left the man.

It is also not a second catalog. Alexandra Cunningham Cameron's exhibition and the volume that accompanied it did serious scholarly work and I have leaned on both. But a catalog can tell you what the clothes looked like, the oversized silhouettes, the natural fibers, the refusal of gender rigidity, and it cannot tell you what it was like to be a young Black man arriving at Parsons in the mid-1960s, or to build a company to twenty-five million dollars while being gay in an industry where that was simultaneously an open secret and a professional liability, or to get sick at thirty-eight in a business that would not say the name of the thing killing its own people. Those are biographical questions and they need a biography.

A word on method, because the record here is thin and I would rather say so at the front than let the prose imply a completeness it does not have.

Smith wrote no memoir. There is no substantial body of correspondence available to researchers. His family has been largely private in the decades since his death, and I conducted no interviews for this book. What survives is the clothing itself, a modest run of magazine profiles from WilliWear's good years, oral histories and published recollections of colleagues, the Cooper Hewitt materials, and what Laurie Mallet and others kept in boxes because no institution had asked for it yet. This is a life reconstructed from fragments.

Where the record is complete I follow it. Where it is not, and it frequently is not, I infer from context and I say on the page that I am inferring. That is not the same as evidence and I have not dressed it up as evidence. It is the only honest alternative to silence when a man deserves better than silence and the paperwork has not survived to give it to him.

He was born on a twenty-ninth of February, which is a date the calendar offers once every four years. A man who lived thirty-nine years had nine birthdays. He built, in that time, something the industry has spent four decades rebuilding without knowing that it was rebuilding.

Chapter 1 · The Erasure

The most commercially successful Black designer in the history of American fashion has no biography. No documentary. No feature film. No coffee-table retrospective aimed at a general audience. No authorized account of how he lived, what he built, or why it ended. His name does not appear in the fashion histories that line the shelves of the bookstores on lower Broadway, a mile south of the loft where he worked and half a mile north of the Garment District where his clothes were manufactured. The industry that he helped to invent, an industry that by the third decade of the twenty-first century would be valued at more than one hundred billion dollars worldwide, does not, as a general matter, know who he was.

His name was Willi Smith. He was born in Philadelphia in 1948, the son of an ironworker and a homemaker. He won a scholarship to the Parsons School of Design in New York, and left before graduating. He worked his way through the New York fashion industry of the late 1960s and early 1970s, designing for other people's labels, learning the business from the inside, and developing a conviction that became the organizing principle of his career: that well-designed, fashionable clothing should not be a luxury reserved for the wealthy. He founded a company called WilliWear in 1976 with a business partner named Laurie Mallet. Within a decade, WilliWear was grossing more than twenty-five million dollars a year, making it the most commercially successful Black-owned fashion company in the United States and one of the most successful independent fashion labels of any kind. His clothes were worn by college students, artists, musicians, dancers, architects, and people who cared about what they put on their bodies but who could not, or would not, spend designer prices. He designed the homecoming-court costumes for Spike Lee's School Daze. He collaborated with the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude on the wrapping of the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. He worked with Keith Haring. He dressed the streets of American cities for ten years with clothing that was democratic, comfortable, culturally engaged, and beautiful.

He died on April 17, 1987, at the age of thirty-nine, of complications related to AIDS. He was one of the most prominent figures in the American fashion industry at the time of his death. Within five years, he was almost entirely forgotten.

The forgetting was not accidental. It was not the ordinary dimming that time performs on all reputations. It was not the natural consequence of a career cut short, designers who die young are often lionized, not erased. Halston died of AIDS in 1990 and has been the subject of a biography, a documentary, and a Netflix miniseries. Perry Ellis died in 1986, a year before Smith, of an illness never publicly named as AIDS but understood within the industry to be AIDS-related. His name still adorns a major fashion brand. The difference was not talent, and it was not commercial success. The difference was that Halston and Ellis were white.

The erasure of Willi Smith is a particular story about particular forces. It is a story about race, about sexuality, about disease, and about the fashion industry's long, ugly tradition of profiting from Black creativity while refusing to credit it. It is also a story about class. Smith's clothes were not couture. They were not aspirational in the way that the fashion press preferred clothes to be aspirational, signifying wealth, exclusivity, access. They were the opposite. They were clothes for people who wanted to look good without pretending to be rich. The fashion press, which has always been more comfortable with exclusivity than with democracy, never quite knew what to do with this proposition. WilliWear was covered, and covered favorably, but it was never covered with the reverence that the press reserved for designers whose clothes functioned as status markers. Smith made beautiful clothes for ordinary people, and the fashion press liked its beautiful clothes to be for extraordinary people.

When he died, and the cause of death was AIDS, and the industry's response was silence, the erasure accelerated. His business partner, Laurie Mallet, tried to keep WilliWear alive. She could not. The label closed in 1990. The clothes disappeared from the stores. The archive was dispersed. And the man who had built one of the most important American fashion companies of the twentieth century slipped out of the historical record as if he had never been in it.

What does the popular imagination believe about Willi Smith? Almost nothing. This is itself the distortion that the biography must correct. The received narrative about Smith is not a false story but an absent one. He has not been mythologized, patronized, or misrepresented in the way that many subjects of biography have been. He has simply been dropped. The slot in the cultural memory that should contain his name, the slot that would connect the accessible, street-inflected, culturally engaged fashion of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to its point of origin, is empty. When fashion historians write about the birth of streetwear, they typically begin with Shawn Stussy's surfwear company in the mid-1980s, or with the downtown New York skate culture of the early 1990s, or with the Japanese designers who brought streetwear aesthetics to a global audience in the late 1990s. Smith, who was doing all of this a decade earlier, does not appear.

The omission is so thoroughgoing that it requires explanation. A designer whose company grossed twenty-five million dollars a year in the mid-1980s does not simply vanish from history. Something must push him out. Something must decide, actively or passively, that his story is not worth telling. Something must conclude that the founding of the most successful Black-owned fashion company in America, the invention of a design philosophy that anticipated the dominant fashion culture of the subsequent fifty years, and the death of a thirty-nine-year-old man in the middle of a pandemic that was killing his generation of creative professionals, that none of this is worth a book, a film, a documentary, a proper entry in the record.

The something, in this case, was multiple somethings. It was race. It was the stigma of AIDS in an industry that was losing dozens of its most talented people to the disease and could not bring itself to talk about it. It was the class prejudice of a fashion establishment that valued exclusivity and regarded democratic pricing as a sign of aesthetic unseriousness. It was the collapse of WilliWear after Smith's death, which meant that there was no surviving institution with a financial interest in maintaining his legacy. And it was the simple, brutal efficiency of American cultural memory, which has room for a limited number of names and which has, historically, allocated those names to white men.

The allocation is not a conspiracy. It does not require anyone to have decided, explicitly, that Willi Smith should be forgotten. It requires only the accumulation of ordinary decisions, each individually defensible, each operating within the established logic of the fashion industry's institutional structures, that together produce the result of erasure. The editor who assigns a retrospective feature on American fashion and does not think of Smith because Smith's name is not prominently in the record she has inherited. The design school professor who teaches the canonical history of American sportswear because that is the history in the textbook, and Smith is not in the textbook. The museum curator who acquires garments for the permanent collection based on scholarly consensus, and the scholarly consensus has not yet recognized Smith as essential. The fashion journalist who writes about the origins of streetwear and cites the designers whose names appear in the sources she can find, and Smith's name does not appear because the sources that do include him are not the sources she is using. Each individual decision is defensible. The aggregate is indefensible. The aggregate is an erasure.

What makes the erasure of Willi Smith particular, rather than merely typical of the fashion industry's general carelessness about its own history, is that it erased someone who was, by the industry's own metrics of success, one of the most significant American designers of the twentieth century. It is one thing for the industry to forget a talented designer who achieved modest commercial success and died young. It is another thing entirely to forget a designer whose company grossed twenty-five million dollars a year, who was recognized during his lifetime with the industry's most prestigious prizes, who collaborated with Christo and Keith Haring and Spike Lee, whose clothes were sold in London and, posthumously, in a Paris boutique that carried his name, and who, more than any other single figure, anticipated the design philosophy that would come to dominate the American fashion industry for the next four decades. The forgetting of a designer of this significance is not an accident. It is a fact about the industry that requires explanation, and the explanation is the story this biography tells.

The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, mounted an exhibition called Willi Smith: Street Couture in 2020, thirty-three years after his death. The Cooper Hewitt is a particular kind of institution: not a fine art museum, not a fashion museum in the conventional sense, but a design museum, which means it is organized around the proposition that design, including fashion design, is a form of human creative activity that deserves the same institutional attention and scholarly rigor that fine art receives. The choice of the Cooper Hewitt as the institution to mount the first major Smith retrospective was appropriate in a way that a fashion museum's presentation might not have been: the Cooper Hewitt's framing of Smith as a designer rather than merely a fashion designer gave the exhibition a scope that captured the breadth of his creative engagement more fully than a fashion-industry framing would have.

The exhibition was curated by Alexandra Cunningham Cameron and was, by all accounts, a thoughtful and well-researched effort to bring Smith's work back to public attention. It was accompanied by a catalog that constitutes, as of this writing, the most substantial published account of Smith's career. The catalog is excellent. It contains essays by scholars who understand the significance of what Smith built. It reproduces photographs of the clothes, of Smith himself, of the WilliWear studio and showroom. It places Smith in the context of the broader movements, in fashion, art, music, and film, that his work intersected with and influenced.

But a catalog is not a biography. A catalog is organized around objects. It is organized around what was made, not around who made it and why. The Cooper Hewitt show could tell you what WilliWear looked like, the oversized silhouettes, the natural fabrics, the bright colors, the playful geometry, the refusal of gender rigidity, but it could not tell you, in the way that a biography can, what the experience of being Willi Smith was like. What it was like to be a young Black man from Philadelphia arriving at Parsons in the mid-1960s. What it was like to work in the New York fashion industry during a period when Black designers were largely invisible. What it was like to build a company from nothing, to watch it succeed beyond any reasonable expectation, and then to get sick and to die at thirty-nine while the industry you had spent your life in refused to name the disease that was killing you. These are biographical questions. They require biographical treatment. The catalog could not provide this, and nobody else has.

The biography that follows is an attempt to fill the empty slot. It is not a definitive biography, the documentary record of Willi Smith's life is incomplete, as the documentary records of almost all people who die at thirty-nine are incomplete, because thirty-nine-year-olds have not yet had time to become the subjects of the kind of archival accumulation that biographers depend on. Smith did not write a memoir. He left no substantial body of correspondence that has been made available to researchers. His family has been largely private in the decades since his death. What survives are the clothes themselves, a modest number of magazine interviews and profiles from the years of WilliWear's success, the memories of colleagues and collaborators, the Cooper Hewitt catalog, and the scattered materials that Laurie Mallet and other collaborators kept. The biography is built from these fragments.

Where the record is complete, the biography follows it. Where the record is incomplete, and it is frequently incomplete, the biography does what honest biography has always done: it infers from context, it acknowledges what cannot be known, it reconstructs the world that the subject inhabited and asks what that world would have meant to a person in his position. The inferential method is not a substitute for evidence. It is the only responsible alternative to silence when the evidence is partial and the subject deserves better than silence.

The subject, in this case, deserves a great deal better than silence. Willi Smith was, by any reasonable measure, one of the most important American designers of the twentieth century. He was the most commercially successful Black designer of the 1980s. He invented a design philosophy, democratic, culturally engaged, street-inflected, collaborative across artistic disciplines, that anticipated and shaped the dominant fashion culture of the subsequent half century. He did this while being Black in an overwhelmingly white industry, while being gay in an era when being gay in the fashion industry was both an open secret and a professional liability, and while working in a price category that the fashion establishment regarded as beneath serious consideration.

He died of AIDS at thirty-nine, and the fashion industry that had profited from his talent and his ideas responded by saying nothing. Not nothing about his death, there were obituaries, there were memorial services, there were expressions of grief. Nothing about why he died. Nothing about the disease. Nothing about the epidemic that was killing a generation of creative professionals in the industry's own ranks. The silence was not Smith's alone; it was the silence of an entire industry confronting its own catastrophe and deciding that discretion was preferable to honesty.

This biography breaks that silence, thirty-nine years after it was imposed. It tells the story of a man who made beautiful clothes for ordinary people, who believed that fashion was a democratic art, who collaborated with the most important artists of his generation, and who died before anyone could thank him properly for what he had built. It tells the story because the story has not been told, and because the absence of the story is itself a form of injustice that can, unlike the disease that killed him, be corrected.

We begin in Philadelphia, in 1948, which was a leap year. Willi Donnell Smith was born on February 29, a date that occurs only once every four years, which means that he had, technically, fewer birthdays than most people. The fact is trivial and also somehow not. A man who would die at thirty-nine had, by the calendar's quirk, celebrated only nine actual birthdays. The world gave him less time than it gives most people, and even the time it gave him it counted oddly. He would make more of his thirty-nine years than most designers make of eighty. He would build a company, invent a philosophy, dress a generation, collaborate with artists whose names would outlast the century, and die before any of it could solidify into the kind of legacy that the culture knows how to preserve.

The biography that follows is organized around the conviction that the preservation of a life in writing is not the same as the recovery of a life in history. The writing can offer what the history has not: a continuous account, from beginning to end, of what it meant to be Willi Smith, to have grown up in Philadelphia in the 1950s and arrived in New York in the 1960s and built a company in the 1970s and 1980s that changed American fashion and then to have died at thirty-nine in 1987, leaving the change unacknowledged and the company without its center and the record without an honest account of what had happened. The writing can offer context where the historical record offers absence. It can offer argument where the historical record offers silence. It can say, plainly and fully, what the historical record has struggled to say: that Willi Smith was one of the most important American designers of the twentieth century, that his importance has been obscured by forces that this biography names and examines, and that the naming and the examining are the first steps toward a correction that is long overdue.

The culture did not preserve it. This biography does.