Meet Willy Chavarria: Fashion's New Maverick (2024)

You can spot a Willy Chavarria silhouette from a mile away, from the oversize blazer with exaggerated shoulders, worn by Venus Williams, Tracee Ellis Ross and Leon Bridges, to the super-long basketball shorts favoured by Kendrick Lamar and Justin Bieber. Billie Eilish practically made the label her awards-season uniform, sporting a boxy jacket and khaki shorts at the Golden Globes, and a point-collar short-sleeve shirt, almost dress-length on her petite frame, at the Grammys. Chavarria’s designs are striking in their architectural elegance and the way they celebrate the designer’s Latinx heritage, Catholic upbringing and queer identity. After being named the American Menswear Designer of the Year at the 2023 Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards, and having The New York Times dub him ‘the founding father of a new American style’, Chavarria finds himself in the position of being New York Fashion Week’s fastest-rising star in his late fifties.

‘It seems the timing has been just the way it was meant to be. Because I’m a little older, I never had that mentality of immediacy,’ he tells me.

Over the past 25 years, Chavarria has worked behind the scenes at some of the biggest American brands including Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein, and that breadth of experience seems to have instilled him with self-confidence. When I go to visit him at his studio – a converted 19th-century factory on the Brooklyn water-front – one steamy July afternoon, with the mercury pushing 35˚C and low clouds threatening an impending thunderstorm, I find an almost church-like aura of calm. The surprisingly cool loft space is crammed with racks of clothing among piles of silk-faille rose boutonnières, and smells fragrant, thanks to a combination of palo santo and Saint Willy, a scented bodega devotional candle cheekily Photoshopped to display Chavarria’s visage.

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Dressed in a black graphic tee, wideleg jeans and a gold cross necklace stacked with gold chains, the real Chavarria greets me with a hug. ‘I come from a very traditional Mexican American family who believe in hard work paying off,’ he tells me. ‘I got so much knowledge working so hard for other people that I don’t feel very timid about what I’m doing now.’

For Chavarria, fashion is inherently political, and he doesn’t shy away from hot-button issues. His first-ever New York Fashion Week presentation for AW17 featured models in cages as a commentary on the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the United States southern border. With his SS25 show less than two months away, and the high-stakes presidential election shortly after, he’s keeping his nose to the grindstone and planning a Fashion Week double header: a runway show followed by a panel discussion at the American Civil Liberties Union on the power of voting.

Many brands today are eager to define their so-called ‘purpose’, but for Chavarria, it goes beyond a marketing exercise. ‘The whole reason this brand exists is to act as a creative launchpad to speak to human dignity and equal rights and the raising up of those who need it most: people of colour, queer people, trans people and women,’ he says.

While Chavarria is nominally a menswear designer, his aesthetic clearly appeals to people of all genders. ‘I don’t see it as menswear, I see it as great clothes,’ says actor Tracee Ellis Ross, who wears the label both for red carpet and in her daily life. ‘There’s an element of flamboyance, glamour and street that really matches my soul.’ Chavarria sketches looks without a gender in mind. ‘Fittings are when it really starts to take shape,’ he says. ‘Apparel does not have a gender, it comes down to size specs.’ For pieces that are cut in men’s sizes, he offers a women’s size conversion on the care tag, and vice versa.

A native of Huron, California – the small agricultural community in the San Joaquin Valley where his grandfather had immigrated from Mexico – Chavarria grew up about 3,000 miles away from the New York fashion world. It might as well have been a million. ‘You open the screen door on a hot summer day and a head of lettuce or a watermelon would roll in,’ he jokes. Nevertheless, from the age of five, Chavarria was already attuned to personal style. ‘I would sketch people at Mass: the women in their veils and the men in their dress shirts,’ he recalls. ‘I was always obsessed with the way that people dress to be a part of a community.’ The veils turned up in his AW24 collection, suspended from the bills of baseball caps.

As a teenager, Chavarria cycled through several different looks including preppy, new wave and goth, before finding his people in the rave scene in San Francisco. He moved there in the early 1990s to study graphic design at the Academy of Art University. The plan was to go into advertising. ‘I thought it would be really amazing to have your creative imprint in people’s lives with big images,’ he says. It was the era of CK One, and he was inspired by the powerful visuals of street-cast models such as Jenny Shimizu – then an auto mechanic, just being herself in her Calvins. But a job opportunity on the design team at the men’s underwear start-up Joe Boxer sent him off on a different trajectory.

Similarly to Vietnamese American designer Peter Do, Dominican American designer Raul Lopez of Luar, and a number of other Stateside contemporaries, Chavarria is using his catwalk to tell rich personal stories about American identity, the place his family hails from, and how all of that shapes the clothes he creates. Although the United States is a nation built by immigrants – if you go back a few generations, almost everyone has family that came from somewhere else – this wasn’t always the norm.

The Great American Melting Pot, the idea that successive waves of immigrants would assimilate into an American monoculture, held sway from the fashion industry’s origins in the early 20th century, leading to idealised Americana archetypes that didn’t necessarily represent all Americans – or correspond to the designers’ own personal origin stories. Elder statesman of New York fashion Ralph Lauren, himself a child of Jewish immigrants from Belarus, born Ralph Lifsh*tz in the Bronx, started his label in 1967 – the same year Chavarria was born. Lauren drew inspiration from the aesthetics of 1930s and 1940s Hollywood cinema to build a £8 billion global business, transforming the preppy tailoring of East Coast WASPs and Western jackets traditionally worn by cowboys into aspirational luxury items.

Chavarria’s oversize tailoring takes cues from that same time period, but he looks to styles you won’t see glamorised in old black-and-white movies: high-waisted, wide-legged trousers and long coats with wide lapels and padded shoulders worn by the Mexican American youth subculture the Pachucos, which emerged in South-western cities in the late 1930s. The Pachucos were the victims of the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles, a tragic episode in American history, during which World War II GIs stationed in the area violently attacked local Mexican American residents for their clothing choices. Under Chavarria’s deft hand, their style becomes a powerful symbol of rebellion and resilience against cultural assimilation and discrimination.

‘As a Chicano, I think there’s something really important about taking up more space in the room,’ he says of the effect he achieves through horsehair lining and an exaggerated peak in the sleeve head, which brings the sleeve out about a half-inch more than it ‘should’ be. ‘They’re strong shoulders to keep you protected and secure,’ he says.

Protection is the theme of Chavarria’s AW24 collection Safe From Harm, which features very structured and ‘not to be messed with’ clothing in soft, luxurious fabrics, such as beautiful Japanese and Italian wool and cashmere. ‘The message is how important it is for us to keep each other safe and make each other feel like we’re OK,’ says Chavarria. The show was held in a warehouse-turned-events space next to Chavarria’s studio in February, and featured a handful of famous Latinx models (Paloma Elsesser, Dilone, Lineisy Montero); trans-visibility activists Kai-Isaiah Jamal and Amara Gisele; and the usual ‘Willy fam’, a crew of mostly non-professional models who walk all of his shows. This season was extra special because Chavarria’s muse Yuji Rico, a 21-year-old house painter with an enviously thick fringe, recruited his mum Erika Trujillo – a 42-year-old construction worker who immigrated from Mexico at 17 and always dreamed of modelling – to walk, too. ‘It was a very special day, walking the runway with my mother,’ Rico says. ‘Being able to help her accomplish one of her dreams meant the world.’

The show began with an atmospheric short film directed by Chavarria, which featured most of the same crew having a dance party in a church and hanging out in a convent in their skivvies – or make that Willys. It turned out to be a preview for Chavarria’s new underwear range, which includes high-waisted bikinis and ribbed tanks he calls ‘wife pleasers’. Catholic iconography is integral to Chavarria’s cinematic vision; he loves the traditions and wants to de-programme the negative effects of church teachings. ‘I like to reenvision or distort the impact religious influence has on us,’ he says, ‘I like to show queer and trans and all kinds of people in that environment being welcome.’

This story appeared in the October issue of ELLE UK, on newsstands September 5.

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