The Internet has been abuzz since last month when Will Smith’s 17-year-old son, Jaden, was named the new face of Louis Vuitton women’s wear.
Plenty of questions and theories about the unorthodox partnership have been discussed but one of the main questions on the minds of people has been “What do Jaden’s parents, Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith, think of his gender-bending campaign?”
During a recent interview on BBC Radio 1Xtra, the 47-year-old actor and rapper spoke candidly about his son’s choices after the show’s host, A. Dot, asked if he and Jada purposely allow for the kids to have “a lot of freedom of expression.”
“Yeah, I think it may have been a mistake,” Smith joked. “I think we may have gone too far.”
Getting to the nitty gritty with the question on everyone’s mind, A. Dot then asked, “How do you respond then, for example, if you encourage them to have freedom of expression and then people will start making jokes about say Jaden modeling women’s clothes. How do you – as a dad – handle that?”
“There’s a really powerful internal quality as an artist that as parents we encourage,” Smith explained. “You gotta get out on the edge, you have to try things, you have to be comfortable doing things that people don’t agree with, and you have to be comfortable doing things that you could fail.
“And Jaden is 100% fearless, he will do anything,” Smith emphatically added. “So as a parent it’s scary, it’s really terrifying – but he is completely willing to live and die by his own artistic decisions and he just doesn’t concern himself with what people think.”
Jaden, who has no qualms with this disdain for conventional fashion, says he relishes the fact that people think he’s missing some screws.
“I feel like it’s an honor, actually, for people to think I’m crazy,” he told GQ last year. “They thought Galileo was crazy, too, you know what I’m saying? I don’t think I’m not as revolutionary as Galileo.”
And there you have it, folks.
It looks as though Jaden is playing by his own rules and we all need to catch up.
