Willow Smith Has a Lot to Say About Socks and the Universe: The Singer on Becoming Stance’s New Muse

“Designing socks is very interesting because they are items of clothing that aren’t seen a lot,” Willow Smith, the 15-year-old singer and Stance Socks’s newly appointed “Punk & Poet,” says to me via email. “For me, socks can emit energy through you—even if nobody sees them. They have a message on them that radiates through your entire being . . . at least for me they do.” While I’ve never thought of my sock drawer as an energy field, admittedly, it’s also never witnessed the likes of the novelty pieces Smith models in the just-launched Miss Dazey campaign for the brand known for its recent collaboration with Rihanna.

But Smith is becoming quite the fashion wunderkind, and just as her brother Jaden recently lent his gender-fluid style to Louis Vuitton’s Spring 2016 campaign, Willow infuses plenty of her envelope-pushing spirit into this bright new selection of socks. She sports the colorful range of psychedelic-printed silhouettes as if they were second skin, and right in step with her own interest in the cosmic and surreal. Meanwhile, the striped, vintage-inspired over-the-knee designs recall the very ones she wears with her spunky, riot grrrl onstage performance looks of Puma creepers and thigh-grazing minis.

And although these accessories may not yield the fashion risk Smith’s much-discussed faux naked trompe l’oeil vintage Jean Paul Gaultier turtleneck once did, they are still defying similar sartorial and social conventions. “I wanted to work with Stance because the company’s creative values resonated with me, and we both have the creative mind-set of forward thinking and pushing toward the future,” she says. “I choose the projects that are going to push unity and expression into the world in the most intelligent and artistic way possible.”

Stance, which also calls another style rebel—Rihanna—a collaborator, gave Smith plenty of control over her personally designed collection of socks that will debut later this year. Unsurprisingly, her point of reference for the collection goes far beyond fashion . . . far beyond the atmosphere, even. “I just learned that each time we see a full moon, it’s one-quarter of a centimeter farther away from Earth!” she says. “That just inspires me to show the world that crazy shifts and happenings aren’t just occurring on Earth. Things are going on in all corners of the universe.” How that will parlay into the designs is yet to be seen, but we have a feeling our sock drawers are about to get pretty out of this world.

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