Raw Cotton Mini Skirt by Willi Smith
CHAMBERS VINTAGE ARCHIVAL
Raw Cotton Mini Skirt by Willi Smith crafted from un-dyed cotton with two unique & utilitarian hip pockets. The mix of traditional with casual utilitarian styling in this piece is the perfect example of Smith's ability to adapt historical fashion styling with thorough American sensibility geared toward use and ergonomics.Â
Circa 1980s
Condition:like newÂ
Designer: Willi Smith
Size S
Waist 26"
Hips 18"
Length 19"
Willi Smith (1948-1987)
Willi Donnell Smith was an American fashion designer. During his twenty-year career, he 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.
