14 DAY TRIAL // The Smith kids, Jaden and Willow, are exhausting all the good will available online thanks to their famous parents Will and Jada Pinkett, as you must know if you keep up with the rumors and chatter in the blogosphere. So when dad Will stepped up to defend Jaden in his most recent interview, the bloggers pounced.
And they had good reason for it, because Will Smith is trying to sell an image of Jaden and their family that probably has nothing to do with reality. Apparently, Jaden only owns one pair of shoes and no more than five shirts.
Jaden isn’t into “slavery to dollars”
Will Smith has a new action movie to promote, “Focus,” also starring Margot Robbie, and he sat down for a chat with Esquire magazine. As it always happens with any interview with members of the Smith family, the question of how successful they all are, whether in separate projects or together, came up.
The kids might make a lot of money, Will says, but they taught themselves from early on not to be slaves to the almighty dollar. When you have enough money to be able to buy absolutely anything you could ever want, it’s easy to talk big like that, but Will insists that Jaden does more than empty-talk.
“Jaden, my sixteen-year-old, he has one pair of shoes,” the actor explains. “He has three pair of pants and he has five shirts. [In] total. He has refused to be a slave to money. I so respect that. The younger generation is less of an ownership generation, anyway.”
According to the proud poppa, Jaden has made a deliberate choice not to “need things in that way,” even though he could afford them all and still be left with money to spare. So he never buys anything and sticks to the bare necessities.
This, we assume, is what allows him to grow as a person and artist, and thus have the confidence to declare in an interview that his goal in life is to be the best… at everything.
Paparazzi pictures don’t lie
Here’s where it gets tricky to Will: he told what he probably thought was a harmless lie and forgot that anyone with a computer or a phone and an Internet connection can quickly find evidence to call him out on it.
Paparazzi pictures don’t lie. There are virtually hundreds of photos of Jaden from last year alone, showing that he does, indeed, own more than the number of items listed above by his father. We’re not even including here red carpet appearances, because designers tend to offer celebrities free clothes for these occasions - though, if you think about it, they still end up owning these because they get to keep them.
Moreover, Jaden is designing his own clothing line, so he’s often seen modeling items from it.
So unless for Will Smith “to own” means something else than it does for the rest of the world, he’s lying.