The American Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, in Paris’s eighth arrondissement, has long attracted the great and the good, with Elizabeth Taylor and Grace Kelly once attending charity galas there. On a cold night in January, however, a very different congregation has come to pray – an unlikely flock of editors, actors and fashion and media faces. Influencers pose in front of a vast arrangement of flowers, candles and incense; the nave is smothered in smoke; and the name of the priest leading this ceremony is spelled out on baseball caps and oversized American football shirts as people take to their seats: WILLY.
Over the past decade, Willy Chavarria has developed a fashion brand that is also a credo. The New York-based designer, 57, a queer man of Mexican and Irish-American heritage, born in California, sells not just clothes – a mixture of angular, dramatic tailoring and sexy, provocative sportswear – but a vision of peace, unity and tolerance. It’s an approach that has won him two consecutive CFDA American Menswear Designer of the Year awards, and seduced Billie Eilish, Justin Bieber and Kendrick Lamar – who collaborated with Chavarria on a special line of merchandise for Lamar’s appearance last month at the Super Bowl. The cathedral fashion show is an exhibition of his inclusivist ideals, with a catwalk featuring Colombian pop superstar J Balvin, construction workers from Texas, supermodels, trans activists and UFC fighters. Willy Chavarria’s is a broad church – and he wants you to join it.
“Willy weaves culture, style, identity and activism into great clothes,” says the actor Tracee Ellis Ross, who has worn his pieces for several years (if the designer primarily shows and sells to the menswear market, his designs are often unisex). “He shows us what fashion can be and can do; his garments and his shows create space, and transcend antiquated ideas about humanity. Willy reminds us that beauty and dignity, equity and justice can exist in American ready-to-wear.”
“For me, he represents the voice of immigrants and Latinos, not just in the United States, but globally,” says J Balvin. “He presents a fusion of art and fashion that elevates Latinos in every sense, using a unique and inclusive language that celebrates our aesthetic.”
Chavarria’s work often draws from streetwear and chicano culture – the zoot suit, for instance. “It’s a new vision of Americana,” says New York-based consultant and editor Chris Gayomali, currently interim managing editor at SSense, who has followed Chavarria since his debut a decade ago. “I feel like he’s in the lineage of great American designers, and maybe he can reach that pantheon in a couple of years because his work is so distinctive, especially with the broad-shouldered silhouettes. He plays around with ideas of masculinity and identity in such a cool way, but it doesn’t feel forced.”
A few days prior to the show, Chavarria is holed up in a windowless warren of rooms applying the final touches to the collection. In portraits he can seem severe, but in person he is softly spoken, witty and wry, dressed in a navy blue Danish fisherman’s sweater, black workman’s trousers and natty soft black loafers.
“There are two very big reasons for showing in Paris,” he says. “One is that the brand message is a global message, a message of dignity and love and just general respect for humanity. It has been very America-centric for the past few seasons, and now that the business is growing, I really want the message to touch more people. And second, from a business perspective, it just becomes necessary to s how in Europe for the European market… It allows for more business growth, for potential new partnerships.”
Chavarria has a knack for partnerships: in Paris, he will debut the launch of a second collaboration with Adidas, and another smaller collaboration with the civil-rights organisation Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the dating app Tinder. The result is a sweatshirt that reads “How We Love Is Who We Are”. As ever, with Chavarria, it’s a direct comment on the anti-LGBTQIA+ policies being put out by his own government. “It’s a big part of the message this season, given how under attack we are.”
The brand is still independently owned, and doesn’t disclose its financials, but it reports that its sales have increased between 100 and 150 per cent annually. Willy Chavarria has 110 stockists in 23 countries, with a staff of 10. “I’m at that stage now where I need to invite partners into my business,” says the designer, who hitherto has funded the brand independently. His husband David Ramirez, co-founder of the company since 2015, became COO and CFO in 2023; the couple had previously run a menswear store, Palmer Trading Company, in New York. “He is running the numbers, doing the finance and everything, which is huge,” says Chavarria. “It has positioned us to be in a really good place for investment.”
Chavarria was 47 when he struck out and created his own brand, having spent decades working behind the scenes for other labels and stores (he was senior vice president of design at Calvin Klein from 2021 to 2024). “I thought I was younger when I did it,” he groans. “I can’t believe how old I am.” I tell him he looks great. “It’s The Substance,” interjects his art director, sitting at a nearby table.
Chavarria was born in Fresno, California, the son of a Mexican-American father and an Irish-American mother in a solidly working-class household. Fashion didn’t figure in their vocabulary: “The priorities were much more focused on putting food on the table, hard work and having a good strong family.” He was “much more interested in style” than in fashion, anyway. “I loved art, television, film… I was obsessed with movies and movie posters; with the books of Richard Scarry; and the way that people dressed. I guess you could say that I was an outsider.” His main creative outlet was drawing. “I drew a lot of women in dresses. And gruesome murder scenes!” Detailed ones? “Oh, it was quite gory. I was really obsessed with detail.”
He didn’t set out to become a fashion designer. He studied graphic design in San Francisco before taking a job in the stock room at men’s underwear brand Joe Boxer. “That was the first time I saw the potential of making a career, because I was exposed to the people there. I could see: oh, there’s a production director, a designer…”
He shifted into designing, eventually working for companies such as Ralph Lauren (for a diffusion cycling line called RLX). “It’s where I got my education,” he says. “I tell young people, you’ve got to go get a job somewhere. Because it isn’t just standing at an easel, sketching. It’s merchandising. It’s production. It’s distribution. It’s sales. How do you sell? Where do you sell? How do you reach a market?”
Palmer Trading Company specialised in the Americana lumberjack-hipster vibe that thrived in the 2010s, but eventually Chavarria tired of it. “I was so sick of that heritage thing, that Americana thing,” he says. “I was like: let me just try and make my own collection.” In 2015 he designed a small capsule, which, he says proudly, “was so beautiful. It was nothing but straight, simple, beautiful things.”
When, in February 2017, he had the resources to do a first catwalk show, he didn’t hold back. The presentation, titled “Harder”, opened with all the models held in a large iron cage. It was a direct allusion to the policy, recently launched by the new Trump administration, of locking up migrants at the Mexican-American border. “It just felt like something I had to do, you know?” he says.
Politics has always been baked into the brand. “It was risky,” he says. “A lot of people and stores and close advisers discouraged me from doing that, because you could lose customers, you could create divisiveness. But I found the opposite to be true. I found that when you communicate on a personal level with people, it’s a much more intimate connection. The clothes are the message.”
Chavarria’s signature silhouette is a blazer with big, cliff-like shoulders. “It’s my modern interpretation of what the zoot suit was in the 1940s, which was a political statement at the time,” he says. “Mexican-Americans in Texas or Los Angeles wearing fashion to proclaim identity.” The zoot was famously contentious: during the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943, people wearing the suit were attacked for being “unpatriotic”. For Chavarria, these silhouettes are, today, “a kind of reclaiming of territory… I want whoever wears the clothes to feel empowered.
“I see myself as a designer who happens to be Latino, not a Latino designer,” he goes on. However, “I undoubtedly recognise the fast-growing Latino market and how it has not really been recognised by any brand. It’s the largest growing demographic right now in the United States, which is the largest market in the world – so it’s nice making that connection.”
The brand speaks to a wide audience. “We have the older over-30s, who are into tailoring and some of the specialty outerwear; and then we have a very large audience, a much younger audience, buying the graphics, the jersey knits, the fleeces.”
“The jersey pieces do very well for us,” says Bosse Myhr, director of menswear, womenswear and childrenswear at Selfridges. “Customers’ favourites are the Latino Fan Club T-shirt [£265], his version of an American football jersey [£530] and the collaboration with Adidas.” Myhr is also looking forward to “his new vision on cuts for trousers and formal jackets, especially with his take on tailoring”.
The tailoring takes pride of place on the racks of clothes due to be shown in Paris. Chavarria lovingly points out the details: the small aperture designed into each shirt where every man (or woman) can hang their glasses; the Chanel-ish tweeds or the spoofs on a Charvet shirt label that, he says “are little kisses to Paris”. The brand has recently moved production of its tailoring from New York to Italy, signalling his desire to keep elevating “into luxury”.
That said, much of the brand’s buzz depends on a very naughty, streetwear-based sex appeal. It can be filthy – literally so. Last year, the brand dropped a capsule called Dirty Willy Underwear, selling “stained” and holey jockstraps and boxers from £282 for a destroyed brief. “It was 100 per cent a marketing thing,” he shrugs of the stunt. “It sold much better than I anticipated – Dover Street Market is now selling it.” The plan is to launch more feasible, cleaner underwear at a lower price point, around £70 a pair. “It’s a direction that is part of the brand identity but it’s not the brand identity,” he says of Dirty Willy. “We did pee-stained underwear – and now we’re doing Italian brocades in Paris.”
Accessories are another sector he is developing, with rosary beads made from Mexican pearls and rubies, as well as tote bags at a more affordable price also going into production. It’s a tricky line, both shifting to a higher level but still speaking to the wider demographic. Chavarria wants to avoid “confusion” for the customer. He and his team have, he says, “put a lot of strategy” into creating product for both high-tier retailers and specific direct-to-consumer drops, available online or via pop-ups, that are more accessible.
“I think that the current definition of luxury is not where we’re at culturally,” he says. “My sense of luxury is: you buy something because you’re so aligned with the position that that brand takes on life. You don’t buy it because it’s going to make you look rich, you know? Quiet luxury, to me, is just a waste of time. Why bother? Get it on eBay.”
Eight years on from his politicised debut, another Trump administration is back in the White House. The fashion world is in a more fragile place than in 2017, however, and there has been less direct outrage aimed at this version of the government. You might imagine that Chavarria, looking to grow his business, would mitigate his stance – but no.
“You can’t stay in the middle,” he says. “So many of the big companies, the big brands, are having a hard time being interesting because they’re in the middle and they don’t want to offend anybody. That’s why so many of them come to me for advice, for help with the cultural elements.” In addition to his brand, Chavarria also has a creative consultancy, helping brands build “creative relevance”. “To me, it’s like, duh! This is what you do. But people are being very, very timid about what they put out there.”
The Willy Chavarria message is still one of love and unity; for all the strong signalling, this is a man whose career has developed very softly-softly. A few days later, the afterparty for the Paris fashion show will reportedly be a riot, but Chavarria himself will only drop in for a minute. “It’s too loud!” he chuckles. “A steak and a Martini. That’s all I need.”