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Willi Smith: Street Couture
African-American fashion designer Willi Smith, pioneer of streetwear and visionary collaborator, finally gets his due in an exuberant celebration of his life and work.
Before Off-White, before Hood By Air, before Supreme, there was WilliWear. Willi Smith created inclusive and liberating "I don't design clothes for the queen, but the people who wave at her as she goes by," he said. A rising star from the time he left Parsons, Smith went on to found WilliWear with Laurie Mallet in 1976 and became one of the most successful designers of his era by his untimely death in 1987. Smith broke boundaries with his streetwear, or "street couture," and trailblazed the collaborations between artists, performers, and designers commonplace today in projects with SITE Architects, Nam June Paik, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Spike Lee, Dan Friedman, Bill T. Jones, and Arnie Zane. Essays by leading figures from the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, and cultural studies paired with never before-seen images and ephemera make Willi Smith essential reading for the history of streetwear culture and the evolution of fashion from the 1970s to today.
Before Off-White, before Hood By Air, before Supreme, there was WilliWear. Willi Smith created inclusive and liberating "I don't design clothes for the queen, but the people who wave at her as she goes by," he said. A rising star from the time he left Parsons, Smith went on to found WilliWear with Laurie Mallet in 1976 and became one of the most successful designers of his era by his untimely death in 1987. Smith broke boundaries with his streetwear, or "street couture," and trailblazed the collaborations between artists, performers, and designers commonplace today in projects with SITE Architects, Nam June Paik, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Spike Lee, Dan Friedman, Bill T. Jones, and Arnie Zane. Essays by leading figures from the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, and cultural studies paired with never before-seen images and ephemera make Willi Smith essential reading for the history of streetwear culture and the evolution of fashion from the 1970s to today.
- GenresFashion
256 pages, Hardcover
Published March 24, 2020
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October 17, 2024critical piece of fashion, queer, black history. it does get quite repetitive in the excerpt format, everyone says the same things about him. that he was groundbreaking, that he made clothes for the people, his burial within history. good?
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