Actor-musician Jaden Smith added footwear designer to his resume last summer when he teamed up with New Balance to design the vegan Vision Racer sneaker.
Seven months on, the celebrity son of box-office dynamo Will Smith is parting with one of his own personal pairs and selling it on the peer-to-peer menswear marketplace Grailed. “I have so many pairs of those shoes in my closet, I actually wanted to give those out to people, you know what I mean, and give them a signed pair,” Smith said in a video on Grailed’s site.
The autographed Vision Racers represents one of 100 items to feature in the secondhand marketplace’s Grailed 100 sale. Besides Smith, the “style enthusiasts” participating in the promotional event include Fear of God founder Jerry Lorenzo, last year’s FN Achievement Awards designer of the year Salehe Bembury, influencer Luka Sabbat, actor Quintessa Swindell and Los Angeles designer Greg Lauren.
Most pieces featured in the Grailed 100 promotion will come from the curators’ personal collections and be priced “well below market value,” it said. Prices will range from $60 to $7,000 for the rarest items.
Chief marketing officer Matthew Eberhart said Grailed originally started the program by tapping into its own archive. In prior iterations—this marks the eight-year-old company’s third run—Grailed simply highlighted 100 “insane pieces” it wanted to share, he added.
“This year we decided to take a different approach and focus on the concept of the Class of 2021,” Eberhart told Sourcing Journal. “We thought, ‘Who are the people who are defining style today?’”
Related Stories
Smith, who Eberhart praised for “his fearless, unique perspective on men’s style,” will also offer two other items from his personal closet. One is a signed hoodie from his recent collaboration with Online Ceramics. The other comes from a series of pieces he created for his 2017 album “Syre” using, appropriately enough, secondhand tees.
“I would go, I would thrift a bunch of clothes and then I would just print Syre on top of whatever I purchased,” Smith said. “Those are some of my favorite shirts.”
Recently tasked with driving the creative and business strategy for Adidas Basketball globally, Lorenzo will also contribute a few items to the Grailed 100 pool, including a pair of sunglasses from Fear of God’s upcoming collaboration with Grey Ant, as well as a pair of denim jeans and a hoodie from the label’s Seventh Collection.
Additionally, the Grailed 100 collection taps into some of the site’s top sellers, such as Emily Blackwell, who aside from her work on Grailed also “runs a super influential store in Atlanta,” Eberhart said. Her contributions include rhinestone-patched denim jeans and leather overalls by Chrome Hearts and a plaid bondage suit by Vivienne Westwood.
“All of the partners involved in the event are Grailed users,” Eberhart said. “It was hypercritical for Grailed to not only use partners that were interesting or cool to us, but people who are actually part of the community as well.”
In addition to the Class of 2021 offerings, Grailed is also contributing styles from its own Grailed Archive, an extensive vault of rare pieces it keeps in a library in its SoHo showroom.
Consumers can shop the sale on Grailed’s site starting Wednesday. As with previous Grailed 100 events, there is a limit of one item per user. The company plans to donate a percentage of sale proceeds to selected organizations that support the advancement of Black people within the culture and tech industries, including Black and Brown Founders, BUILD NYC, Black in Fashion Council and All Black Creatives.
Resale received a notable endorsement last week when New England Patriots quarterback Cam Newton announced his plans to take a step back from high fashion this year and instead embrace thrift stores and vintage shopping. The sports and sartorial star confessed that his shopping habit has seen him spend “thousands and thousands of dollars and maybe even millions of dollars on clothes that [he] only wore once.”