WILLI SMITH STREET COUTURE
THE MUSEUM
Cooper Hewitt is the nation’s only museum dedicated to historic and contemporary design, with a collection of over 210,000 design objects spanning thirty centuries. Located in the landmark Andrew Carnegie mansion and boasting a beautiful public garden, Cooper Hewitt makes design come alive with unique temporary exhibitions and installations of the permanent collection.
THE COLLECTION
During his twenty-year career Willi Smith (1948–1987) united fashion and American culture, marrying affordable, adaptable basics with avant-garde performance, film, art, and design. Smith hoped to solve what he called “the problem of getting dressed,” or the lack of control fashion afforded the everyday person, by using clothing as a tool for the liberation of stereotypes around race, class, sex, and gender, and bringing art into the mainstream. In the wake of the 1974 recession and Vietnam War, Smith founded WilliWear Ltd. with business and creative partner Laurie Mallet to produce clothing, events, and experiences with a wide range of collaborators who used new technologies and progressive ideas to transform their creative fields and instigate social change. At the time of his sudden death from AIDS-related illness, Smith was considered to be the most commercially successful Black American designer of the 20th century and a pioneer of “street couture”—fashion inspired by the creativity of people from the cities to the suburbs that captured the egalitarian spirit of the age. Willi Smith: Street Couture surveys Smith’s path breaking imagination of an inclusive, collaborative, and playful new society
Illustration, 1984 offset lithograph on tracing paper and Drawing, Menswear Illustration, SUB-Urban Fall 1984 Collection pen and ink, graphite on paper.
Illustration, 1984 offset lithograph on tracing paper and Drawing, Menswear Illustration, SUB-Urban Fall 1984 Collection pen and ink, graphite on paper.
Video, Joyce Theater, New York, 1984
Publicity Photograph, 1983 digital print on paper.
Performance
Willi Smith for Digits, Fall/Winter 1972 Collection, 1972
Uniform, Pont Neuf Wrapped
“Streetwear, as molded by Smith, was an inclusive term that aimed to democratize the way fashion was consumed and experienced.”
Uniform Shirt, The Pont Neuf Wrapped
2 East 91st Street, New York, NY
HOURS
10 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily
Closed Thanksgiving and December 25
TICKETS
$18 Seniors
$12 Students
$9 Visitors with Disabilities
$10 Members & 18 & under fee
www.cooperhewitt.org
by: Katie Coil
