Update: Willow Smith is Teen Vogue's May cover girl. In the issue, the 15-year-old opens up about what her role for the luxury brand means to her: “Being a young African-American woman with dreads, it blows my mind that I’m a Chanel ambassador," she tells the magazine. "Like, how am I a Chanel ambassador? 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.”
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This story was originally published on March 8, 2016.
The Smith siblings have been racking up some serious fashion cred lately. In January, older brother Jaden made headlines when he modeled Louis Vuitton's latest womenswear collection for its spring '16 ads. Last year was big for Willow, too: She landed a modeling contract, an i-D cover, and a Marc Jacobs campaign. Looks like 2016 won't be too shabby for Willow, either: She was just named the new face of Chanel.
Shortly after the show wrapped, the legendary fashion house announced Willow as the new brand ambassador. Smith took to Instagram to share the news, too, thanking Karl Lagerfeld and the team for the opportunity. (She first met Largerfeld on the set of her V Magazine shoot in 2014, which he photographed.) She specifically called out the brand "for expanding the perceptions of 'beauty' by picking me to be the new Chanel ambassador."
At 15, Smith is the youngest person to hold the title, according to AFP. (Lily-Rose Depp was 16 when she was announced as a brand ambassador in July 2015. Last year, Lagerfeld singled out Inès de La Fressange's then-15-year-old daughter Violette d'Urso as his new muse.) What does this new role mean? Like Depp, Kristen Stewart, and more young starlets who've been faces of the brand, Willow will take her place front row at Chanel shows, star in an ad spot or two, and be decked out in a fair amount of tweed and interlocking C's for the foreseeable future.
"I feel like there is so much creativity going on that I want to inject some of my ideas and some of my energy into the brand," the 15-year-old told Teen Vogue backstage, "because I feel like there's a lot of things that come from youth nowadays that need to be expressed and amplified to the world."
Today in Paris, Willow was at Chanel's #FrontRowOnly show, sitting alongside mom Jada Pinkett Smith. (Willow wore a gray, scuba-like bodysuit look that she described on Instagram as "Chanel ninja.") Her verdict on the fall '16 collection? "You can just tell all the clothes are just crafted with so much care, and you can tell that there’s so much soul put into how they are designed," Smith enthused to WWD. "That’s really the goal that I try to strive for, for everything that I do. It’s like, putting in so much thought and feeling inside of the art that you make, so that everyone can feel it around you."