All hail Jaden Smith! He has no time for your gender norms”and dude used his cover feature in British GQ Style to address our own gender hang-ups.
“I feel like people are kind of confused about gender norms,” said the 17-year-old actor/model (for Louis Vuitton, specifically). “I feel like people don’t really get it. I’m not saying that I get it, I’m just saying that I’ve never seen any distinction.”
“I don’t see man clothes and woman clothes,” he continued. “I just see scared people and comfortable people.”
And that pretty much sums it all up. Because it’s not like we all have to wear gender-neutral pieces or even wear clothes traditionally reserved for a specific gender if you’re not into that”but we do have to get on board with the idea that “men’s clothes and women’s clothes” are a thing only because someone said they were. Like, literally: some dude said “men dress this way and women dress this way,” and now we all must suffer. (Or justify wearing tuxedo jackets by singing the praises of menswear as a women’s “trend.”)
But Jaden’s social awareness didn’t end there.
“I’m really into working towards just fixing the whole planet Earth,” he continued. “I really just want to create a utopia on this planet. I really want to make it so that people don’t have to die to pay bills and just work to survive. So that they can work to actually live and do the things that they love to do.”
Like, can you imagine if Jaden Smith was your kid? I would die of pride, straight-up. You know what I wanted when I was 17? To know where I was going that night and with who and where and how we were going to get our six-packs of Loaded Sodas past our parents. If you had brought up the idea of an egalitarian world, I’d be like, “I don’t know, can I still hang out in the McDonalds parking lot?” and then as long as I could, I’d be down. But dude is aware. He’s so smart! I don’t even think I knew a 17-year-old like him when I was that age.
So going forward, I will now champion Jaden Smith like he’s my own best friend, and I will ask my cousin every time I see him, “Why can’t you be more like Jaden Smith?” (And because he’s the dude equivalent of myself at his age, he will mumble an answer and say, “I’m tired.”)
Jaden Smith 2016, you know? Or at least Jaden Smith for more fashion campaigns.
