This designer will do anything for his village
By Leah Dolan, CNN
Paris (CNN) — Fashion designer Willy Chavaria ranks well against all the typical measures of success within the fashion industry: he has a dedicated celebrity client roster, hundreds of thousands of Instagram followers, partnerships with global stockists and he’s launched collaborations with mainstream brands like Adidas, Zara and just teased another with Ugg. But he’s also built a village, a community as they say in the biz, of people who root for him — outside of simply buying his clothes — and he’ll do just about anything for them.
Since launching his menswear brand in 2015, the Mexican American designer casts the same key models repeatedly, such as Shaid Anaya, who takes breaks from his regular job as a construction workers to walk his shows. (This season, Chavarria re-cast Romeo Beckham after working together in Fall-Winter 2027, and enlisted friend and fellow fashion designer Bella Freud to walk.) His clothes, which are usually a homage, nod or reclamation of Chicano style, are not only celebrated in fashion circles but have managed to permeate the wider culture: There is an essay in the Harvard Review of Latin America dedicated to the emotional impact of Chavarria’s designs, where UC Santa Barbara professor Aída Hurtado writes that the first time she saw one of his shows online she “cried for a day.” And as of this year, the town of Huron, California, where the designer grew up, even named a day in his honor.
But as the saying goes, to have a village you must be a villager. This part of the deal appears to come naturally to Chavarria, who returned to Paris on Friday afternoon for his fourth season at the Men’s Fashion Week. In the days leading up to his show, Chavarria and his team were hard at work in his make-shift studio in the 6th arrondissement. So much so that it’s tough to pin him down for our scheduled interview. Each room we walk into offers up a new stimulus: a model’s shirt needs adjusting, which then must be tested with a quick strut; or a VIP’s outfit needs selecting, which, surprisingly, Chavarria sees to personally. There are hellos and photos and hugs. At one point right before we sit down to talk, the US rapper and show guest SAINt JHN voices concern over his look’s cream chino shorts. Might something in a darker color work better? Before I knew it, Chavarria was slipping off his own new season navy cotton cut-offs and handing them over, leaving himself standing diminutively in his oversized shirt and underwear. If you’re one of the ‘Willy Boys,’ the term he and his team use for his recurring models-turned-friends, he’ll happily give you the shirt off his back — or the shorts off his thighs, apparently.
It makes sense then that his Spring-Summer 2027 collection is titled “Comunión,” a word that translates to the coming together of people, either secularly or as part of a religious tradition. “Comunión is a belief that we are more whole together than apart, that the beauty of a person is sacred, and that the beauty of many gathered is holy,” read the show notes.
“I really spend a lot of time thinking about how people feel,” Chavarria said in his studio, now back in his shorts. “Like the global mentality of the time, and what it is we want to wear and who we want to be in this moment.” What he came up with was an offering of fun and whimsy — “positivity,” he summarized.
Friday’s runway inside the modernist Espace Niemeyer, the space-age HQ of the French Communist Party, began with a guided meditation reminding frazzled and heat-scorched show guests to relax their jaws, their shoulders, their necks and let any negative thoughts float away. Once the crowd was somatically present, Chavarria sent out a cooling parade of ice-cream colored outfits. There were sexy pencil skirts in pink leather and silky looking turquoise, pink hot pants and matching shoulder padded sweatshirts, an A-line skirt and dress both made from recycled plastic raffia which looked like it had been put through a shredder, as well as tasteful caped cocktail dresses peppered with floral appliqués that, when you get up-close, have the satisfying plasticky sheen of stickers.
That’s a lot of skirts for CFDA’s Menswear Designer of the Year 2023 and 2024. “Womenswear has been my first preference,” said Chavarria at his studio, who “fell into” designing for men when he joined Ralph Lauren in 1999 — his first job in fashion. “I opened a menswear store, and I kind of got a lot of schooling in menswear, so I stayed with that, but I always loved dressing women.” This was Chavarria’s first time showing an equal split of men’s and women’s on the runway, but in reality women have been his customers for a long time. Most savvy shoppers these days are hardly put off by where an item sits in the store, and Chavarria says his menswear is often bought by women. “I love the gender flux between menswear and womenswear,” he said. Some of his freshest celebrity dressing moments have come from Billie Eilish, Tracee Ellis Ross and Ciara, who frequently wear his billowing tailored pants, neckties and oversized button-downs. “But I also wanted to do styles that really accentuate the female figure and feel extremely feminine, so that women can really just enjoy their femininity to the fullest.”
Across fashion weeks, the perennial question of who a collection serves comes up in conversation again and again. With Chavarria, it doesn’t take much to answer. While some designer clothing may be difficult to imagine anywhere other than a runway, his designs are not conceptually overworked, making them easy to wear. “I don’t like to over intellectualize the clothes themselves,” he said. “Because I think at that point it just becomes silly.” This season, he felt inspired by a female archetype everyone is familiar with in some way or another: the confident, hot, inimitable baddie. “That’s the woman,” he said. “That’s the woman I dress.”
“A baddie is a woman that if somebody tries to steal her bag, she beats the shit out of them. With her bag. And then she takes her lipstick out and keeps walking,” he said. Chavarria is already in service to this newfound community — this season designing more variations of the Bronca bag, a leather purse with a magnetic frame which he says is the perfect robber-thwacking tool. “It’s a little badass bag that is built to like get people out of the way when you walk,” he said. Ask nicely and he’ll even demonstrate.
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
