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Whoa. This place is amazing! How dope would it be to do a concert here?” Willow Smith shoots out of a large black SUV like a rocket at takeoff. It is 8:55 on a brutally sunny morning at Los Angeles’s Sepulveda Dam, and our cover star’s hazel eyes are transfixed by the shoot’s location, a sprawling concrete basin, which reads part abandoned skate park, part UFO landing pit. She is rocking an infectious smile and a cropped tee that serendipitously spells out the spirit of our female-led shoot: “Never underestimate the power of a woman.”
Within seconds of her deployment, Willow’s slim fingers find their way into photographer Emma Summerton’s waist-length waves. “This is so cool. I’ve never been shot by a woman before — not for anything this major!” she gushes, stroking Summerton’s soft strands. Then, as if a lightbulb goes off in Willow’s brain, she lunges right into an impassioned soliloquy about the disturbing lack of female representation in male-dominated fields. “There is such a need for more female photographers, physicists, astronauts, doctors.…” The crew nods in agreement, eyeing each other at the exciting and rather unusual start to the day.
Norms tend to fall by the wayside in the midst of this truly willowy enigma, whose mind seems to move at the speed of light itself. At 15, she is already the sum of many things, none of which are saddled with conformity: As the youngest child of box-office legends Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, she’s Hollywood progeny, not to mention a musical wunderkind, a science whiz kid. And with her recent appointment as Chanel’s new ambassador, she is an official style icon-in-the-making. She also makes up one half of possibly the world’s most wonderfully weird brother/sister duo. Willow and her older brother Jaden’s collective persona famously fascinates, perplexes, and stirs up heated debate among adults who simply cannot get on their level. It is a wavelength few can. Willow speaks of their connection as kismet — “We’re like binary stars, like two parts of one thing,” she explains. “I know what he’s thinking at all times. And he knows what I’m thinking. We’re not identical twins, but it feels like that in a lot of ways.”
Labels such as “bizarre” and “self-adoring” have been hurled at these two, only to seemingly roll off their backs. Jaden infamously continues to don his skirts — and not just in the latest Louis Vuitton womenswear campaign (a feat that still sends his little sister into proud squeals). On set Willow gives eye contact, big hugs, lots of thank-yous. Forget whatever tabloid fodder you read; she is a supremely likable, well-mannered kid. She also seems utterly unencumbered by the teenage plight of fitting in — there is a bigger picture to focus on.
In front of the camera, Willow is peerless. She has the self-possession of a supermodel and the baby face of a Disney fairy. This kid’s got it all, I think, studying how she moves every inch of her unwieldy limbs with a dancer’s grace. She’s also calling the shots on the tunes. Kid Cudi’s Satellite Flight blasts from a nearby Jambox, and she gets completely lost in the music, singing along: “Have you ever seen the Earth from this view?” I am convinced that the answer for anybody but Willow is no. She may very well be from a distant planet, a foreign place where women are homegrown superheroes, nurtured to become goddesses; a land where girls are taught to own their power from birth so that by 15 they possess the kind of delightfully off-kilter creativity that marked Warhol-era greats. But it isn’t all art for art’s sake with Willow.
During our New York City breakfast date a few weeks after the shoot, she shows off her radically intellectual side. The teen supernova perks up on topics like nanoscience, civil engineering, and microbiology. She is a self-proclaimed STEM freak, with her sights set squarely on deepening connections in the science community and maybe even attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) one day. It’s why she hopped on a flight to tour the campus in Cambridge directly after Paris Fashion Week (where she excited a flashing mob of paparazzi with karate kicks at Chanel’s #frontrowonly show—NBD!). “It was nice to be able to talk to female students and professors about science and logic because that’s just such a man’s world,” she notes. It should come as no surprise that one of Willow’s favorite topics is changing perceptions about women and girls of color in spaces where they are underrepresented. But don’t call her an activist. Why? Because when you’re Willow Smith, categories can feel restrictive. “I see myself as a—hold on, let me ask Siri.” The teenager whips out her iPhone and speaks into it, drawing stares from tables nearby. “Siri, define artisan.” Everybody’s favorite robotic voice serves up a satisfying definition: Artisan is a worker in a skilled trade, especially one that involves making things by hand. “Ah, OK, yes!” Willow allows. “I call myself an artisan.”
Willow sews clothing, hosts underground teachings in quantum mechanics, and is studying how to produce songs from mathematical equations, yet I wonder if there was ever a time when she felt less empowered. “Yes. One hundred percent,” she responds without missing a beat. “After ‘Whip My Hair’ and all the publicity, after going on tour in the U.K., after saying no to the Annie film, all of this crap was going on in my life, and I had to sit down and say, ‘Who are you? On a real note. Are you this or this?’” She grasps the table’s salt and pepper shakers, one in each hand, for comparison’s sake. “During that time of figuring it out, I was lost and super insecure. But then I stopped trying to find myself in these other inanimate objects, people, and ideas. I realized it isn’t about finding yourself—it’s about creating yourself.” Her sartorial expressions seem to be an inextricable extension of that creation—and they are anything but superficial. “I have some cool shoes on [that day, she is in Chloé Susanna studded booties] and I wear crazy eyeliner, but it’s really all about emulating the colors you feel inside,” she reveals. “A lot of clothes are cute, but after you buy the Yeezy shoes, after you get your hair done with a weave, you’re still the same person. I feel like more and more kids are starting to realize this.”
Shifting gears slightly, she ruminates on the meaning of her new role. “Being a young African-American woman with dreads, it blows my mind that I’m a Chanel ambassador. Like, how am I a Chanel ambassador?” she marvels. “It is so beautiful. I’m coming into a new part of my life that is completely unknown, and I’m jumping right in. All I can do from here is continue to shift paradigms and continue to push the envelope further and further. But I am doing it every day just by being myself.”
teenvogue.com
