When you're the youngest person ever signed to Jay Z's record label and Hollywood starts throwing movie offers at you, life can get a little complicated. What to do? Well, if you're Willow Smith, you turn inward and follow your heart. Even if it means dropping out of the big-budget remake of Annie (produced by your father) and going back to middle school. Says the 13-year-old starlet of her retreat: "To be honest, something inside me was just, like, Don't. I'm very connected with my intuition."
Willow may have hit pause on her meteoric ascent by trading the blockbuster for the classroom, but there's nothing ordinary about the life of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith's daughter. For one thing, she's a burgeoning fashion icon who's drawn comparisons to Rihanna, and her favorite pair of heels were a gift from Karl Lagerfeld himself. ("They make me feel like I'm a sophisticated Amazon woman," Willow says.) Ask about jewelry and she'll gush about Cartier, referring to her mother's gold Juste un Clou bracelet as "sick." She adds, "My whole family, we love Cartier." Still, Willow is experienced in working a healthy mix of high and low, professing to know her way around Target—which she calls her secret for boots, Converse, and Vans. The girl isn't fronting. Ask about a favorite recent purchase and she'll tell you about a cheapie dream-catcher necklace she unearthed at the Fairfax flea market in Los Angeles.
Like all teenagers, Willow and her fashion sense are still evolving, and she's smartly resisting the pressure to define herself. She has made waves for bold outfits (leopard parachute pants paired with a leopard jacket?), but these days she's digging a more laid-back, bohemian vibe (velvet bell-bottoms). Who knows what tomorrow may bring? "My style is who I am all the time," she says, "and who I am always changes." For proof, look no further than her hair, which in the past few years has been green, pink, and now blonde. "My hair is super-, super-, super-, superhard to destroy," she says with a laugh. "It's a survivor." As for the new shade, she proudly reports: "Blondes do have more fun!"
It's been four years since "Whip My Hair" assaulted our earbuds, selling more than a million digital copies to become arguably the song of 2010—parodied by Jimmy Fallon and Bruce Springsteen on late-night TV and subsequently used for an internet meme. When the haters emerged, as they always do, Jay Z compared Willow to the likes of Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder (both started recording at a young age too). While a promised debut album never materialized, Willow didn't stop making music altogether; in fact, she posted a searing ballad called "Drowning" to SoundCloud. Her interest hasn't waned, she explains. She just figured, Why rush it?
"I have enough songs to make an album," Willow says, "but most of the songs I don't like." She assures that new stuff is coming soon—just don't ask Willow to characterize her sound. "It's going to be something outlandish, something that nobody can imagine, something that comes from me and only me. Something we need right now."
Another sign that she's prepping for a major return to the public eye after her yearlong absence? Willow recently started tweeting to her 3.5 million-plus followers on topics as far-ranging as world peace ("We all need to learn how to harmoniously live on this planet without frying it like those systematic French fries the government feeds us") and her trouble with homework ("Teacher: Why don't you have your homework? Me: Too busy learning about life."). "I just felt like people needed to hear what I had to say, man," Willow reveals. "I feel like I can really give people a different view on things."
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