Willi Smith

Willi Donnell Smith was born on the twenty-ninth of February 1948 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of William Smith — a Philadelphia ironworker — and June Eileen Smith. He was raised in the segregated Black community of north Philadelphia.

He attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts on a scholarship from the principal Philadelphia Council of the Arts from 1962 to 1965 — and enrolled at the Parsons School of Design at New York in 1965 on a Coty Scholarship and a Walter Whitney Scholarship.

He left Parsons in 1967 without completing the bachelor's degree and joined the principal New York studio of the designer Arnold Scaasi from 1967 to 1969 as a junior sketcher and pattern maker.

He was hired in 1969 at the Bobbie Brooks junior sportswear company at Cleveland as a junior designer and at the principal Digits sportswear company at New York from 1970 to 1976 as a senior designer.

He founded the principal WilliWear Limited at New York in 1976 with his business partner Laurie Mallet — at the principal post-Digits New York commercial sportswear period. The principal WilliWear collection was launched at the Magic Marketplace at Las Vegas in February 1977 and was retailed across approximately twelve hundred American department stores by the close of the principal 1980s commercial period.

He was the principal Black American sportswear designer of the late 1970s and early 1980s to lead the principal American sportswear-streetwear-relaxed-tailoring tradition — and was named in 1983 a Coty American Fashion Critics Award winner for the principal WilliWear womenswear collection.

His principal WilliWear menswear collection was launched in 1978 and reached approximately forty million dollars in annual retail by the principal closing years of the 1980s.

He was the principal Black American designer of the 1980s to maintain the principal mass-market commercial accessibility — at retail price points between sixteen and two hundred and twenty-five dollars per garment — and the principal designer-streetwear synthesis of the period.

He collaborated with the principal artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude on the principal Pont Neuf wrapped-Paris installation costume design of 1985 and with the principal architect Diane Lewis on the principal WilliWear showroom at 209 West 38th Street at New York.

He died at New York on the seventeenth of April 1987 of complications of AIDS, at thirty-nine.

He is honored here as the founder of WilliWear Limited.