Willy Chavarria, New York fashion’s veteran star

Willy Chavarria is a veteran of American fashion, but the accolades have only recently begun to pile up. The designer, who launched his own quietly lauded label in 2015, was last year nominated for CFDA American Menswear Designer of the Year and took home the 2022 Cooper Hewitt National Design award for Fashion Design. His clothes were also on display as part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2022 exhibition In America: An Anthology of Fashion. And did I mention his day job? Since 2021, he has been the senior vice-president of design at Calvin Klein North America, the American fashion behemoth owned by PVH Corp.

Chavarria’s hand can be seen everywhere — which, no doubt, helped lead to that Klein gig. Other designers follow his boxier shapes and grand swaths of fabric, especially his hyper-voluminous, high-hiked trousers as well as his mixes of blue-collar workwear and formal tailoring. The overblown flower corsages from his spring show have popped up on red carpets, sometimes aped by other labels.

We meet at Chavarria’s small studio in Brooklyn four days before his autumn/winter 2023 collection is due to debut in the final hours of New York Fashion Week. I file in as editors from American Vogue file out, and while the designer is tweaking the seams of an ankle-length satin skirt worn by Erik “Chachi” Martinez, “a good friend and fit model”, says Chavarria. There’s nothing feminine about the skirt whatsoever — it resembles a priest’s soutane, or something a warrior may have sported in the Middle Ages.

I pulled all the colour out — I wanted less noise. The details. A clean slate

“When it comes to a queer identity in fashion, I do like that I do a masculine take to it,” says Chavarria — who is gay himself, and married his partner of more than 20 years, David Ramirez, in 2016. The skirt is black, as is the vast majority of this collection, strict and pure, only alleviated with shots of magnolia white. “I pulled all the colour out — I wanted less noise,” says Chavarria. “No distractions from the person wearing it. The silhouette, the details. A clean slate.”

The individual is vital for Chavarria. His shows from the outset were notable for their unusual cast of mostly POC men who were not professional models — scouted by Chavarria and his casting director Brent Chua across the streets of New York and LA. “I’m always looking for a very specific, ‘storied’ person,” Chavarria says. “That has an emotional presence and exhibits a kind of beauty that isn’t always seen on runways.”

The diversity that is Chavarria’s calling card was well-represented in his spring/summer 2023 show, staged at the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue last September. Chavarria had previously shown in unusual venues, including barber shops and at The Eagle, a gay bar famous from the 1970s leather scene. But the gilded interior of the Fifth Avenue church also reflected a new elevation in Chavarria’s clothes, with sharp tailoring in lustrous silks and mohair wools and grand gestures of rosettes and trains — the result, he says, of working with a specialist atelier.

His latest collection builds intentionally on the structures and sensibility of last season — there’s lots of coats, and even something religious about all that black, and to Chavarria’s floor-dusting velvet or satin coats. “Am I at a funeral, or the opera?” he deadpans.

Joking aside, Chavarria takes his business seriously. His distribution is highly controlled — wholesale is limited to avoid end-of-season discounting, meaning Chavarria is only stocked by about 30 retailers globally, with the lion’s share of sales coming from his own website. Custom orders for private clients and celebrities spiked after the September show.

“It was a big investment,” Chavarria says of that show’s more luxurious fabrics and complex constructions. “It did pay off.” The higher-end items were presented alongside a collaboration with the Texan-founded workwear brand Dickies. “I will still keep those lower-tier things going,” he says. “Those are people who have really helped to grow the business, so I want to make sure they’re still a part of the brand identity.”

If Chavarria doesn’t talk like a young designer, its because he isn’t. It’s another part of his story that’s unusual. Chavarria is 56. He established his brand after two decades working in the garment business for mass market labels, including the underwear brand Joe Boxer and American Eagle Outfitters.

In an odd hangover from that period, underwear is an important component of the Chavarria look — that outfit in the Met consists of gargantuan wool trousers with silk-taffeta boxer shorts peeking above. They have his Christian name printed, suggestively, at the apex of the groin, where say ‘Calvin Klein’ would normally sit.

Chavarria was born in Fresno, California, into a community of immigrant farm workers, with an Irish-American mother and a Mexican-American father. It wasn’t so much fashion that influenced him, he says, but people, “the look”. As a kid, he became fascinated with how everyday people dressed. He moved to San Francisco to study graphic design in his early 20s and, more importantly, began going out, seeing how other people pulled their clothes together, as well as dressing up himself.

Chavarria moved to New York in 1999 at the behest of Ralph Lauren, to work on RLX, a cycling line for the company. “That’s probably where I got most of my education,” he says of his five years there. “All about design, all about quality, all about craftsmanship.” He then moved to American Eagle as design director until 2012, but in October 2010, he established his own multi-brand menswear store, Palmer Trading Company, in New York’s SoHo. It trafficked in Americana, selling a mix of brands and vintage.

A Japanese retailer suggested Chavarria should create his own line, which he did. He was his first fit model — “Everything was really oversized,” he says with a smile. As the brand began to grow, the store was frequently closed for photography and meetings. “And the rent was like $30,000 a month,” Chavarria winces. The store closed, Chavarria moved his operation to Brooklyn, and the brand continued to expand.

Chavarria layers a luxurious silk chiffon shirt over a simple ribbon-cotton tank top on Chachi. There has always been a sense of reality to Chavarria’s clothes — a wearability even when designs veer to the extreme, perhaps the result of not pursuing a formal fashion education. “I never experienced the college side of fashion, going crazy,” he says. “It was always in the relative perspective of business. Maybe its worked to my advantage.”

Chavarria sees his fashion as a form of activism. His first presentation in 2017 — a month into the Trump administration — had his black and brown models literally caged, while his second featured guys provocatively dressed in gay cruising attire. His clothes push at gender boundaries and challenge stereotypes of masculinity.

“I think that unless you’re moving the needle with fashion, you’re just making clothes,” he says. “That’s why I do intentionally incorporate so much storytelling — but also politics and social justice messaging into my work. I can monetise on making clothes, but it needs to have a positive influence on humanity.”

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @financialtimesfashion on Instagram