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I’m disarmed by the way Willy Chavarria’s name shows up in my email: bookended by red heart emojis. It’s how his publicist has saved him in her phone, and soon I’m struck by how accurately it captures the iconoclastic designer. Chavarria, 57, is one of the biggest talents in fashion right now, but he’s also warm, dreamy, and wise. He is grounded in the real world and all its beauty and discontents. “I think what’s different about my approach to fashion,” he tells me in a deep, gentle voice I want to explain everything to me, “is that it’s still very much connected to reality. I want to acknowledge the reality we live in and point out the beautiful aspects of it in a romantic way.”
A look from spring 2025.
Chavarria’s spring 2025 collection, titled América, celebrates the America of brown working people. It is inspired by labor, uniforms, working-class swagger, the exquisiteness of sleeves-rolled-up dignity. We always knew our elders were majestic, but here they are before us, as handsome and powerful as we always knew them to be! A consecration of the highway worker’s or construction worker’s Carhartt jacket; even cooler, a high-fashion consecration of a knockoff Carhartt jacket. Civil rights activism also made a cameo; every seat came with a copy of the Constitution, and Chavarria sported the logo of the American Civil Liberties Union on his cutoff sweatshirt as he took his bow. América makes a central claim to dignity. Chavarria’s work does not claim we have a right to dignity and beauty because we might be descendants of kings and queens. We are alive, and that alone is cause for glamour.
Willy Chavarria spring 2025.
People go to Chavarria for dazzling draping and oversize architectural looks that are technically menswear but fit women’s bodies beautifully, too. That’s built into the brand, which provides size-conversion guides with its garments for whichever gender will wear them. (Billie Eilish is a fan. So are J Balvin and Tokischa.) His clothes are also deeply romantic, hard but soft, masculine and feminine, a suit of armor dancing around a dandelion so as to not crush it. “The romance is the drama of it. It’s the silhouette. It’s the color. It’s the fabrics,” he says. “I feel like [the romance] is an emotional and sensual approach to dressing.”
Chavarria backstage with models before the show.
When he was a boy, Chavarria developed his eye for beauty in the working people around him—rosaries, gold chains, the simple white tank tops Chavarria has renamed wifelovers, bandannas, workwear as church suits, the Sunday best. He also noticed the uniforms. The glamorous, beautiful uniforms.
Resistance is in Chavarria’s blood. He was born in 1967 in a farming community about an hour from Fresno, California. His father is Mexican American, and his mother is Irish American; they met after their high schools were desegregated. “The civil rights movement was such an important part of my family’s life,” he says. “The farmworkers’ union and the farmworkers’ movement with Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta were very important to us, because my family was working in the fields in California. I grew up knowing that those were my people, and I wanted to do what was right for my people.” The United Farm Workers (UFW) logo must feel like a family crest.
When I see one of Willy’s models in a fitted gray crewneck emblazoned with the logo, styled over thick flannels, I stop breathing. An unfamiliar rush of heat fills my chest that feels like pain and pride.
Chavarria feels it too. He tells me a moving story about his fall 2023 collection, held at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. “It was all eveningwear in this opulent, amazing space that you never see brown people in, like, owning it,” he says. “That’s what I told the models—this is your moment. You own this. You own everybody in this room.” An iconic speech almost straight out of Paris Is Burning, the 1990 documentary about New York City ballroom culture. Ballroom was a world of mostly young, queer Black and Latino men with little to their names. In it, the legendary emcee Junior LaBeija directs the performers: “O-P-U-L-E-N-C-E. You own everything! Everything is yours!”
My favorite feature of the new collection? The high-waisted trousers with incredible draping that move seductively as you walk. This silhouette was popular among Mexican American youth in the early 1940s; the full look was called the zoot suit. The fabric rationing of World War II prohibited the suits, but young men around Los Angeles continued to wear them. In June 1943, white servicemen stationed in Southern California went on a multiday mob rampage against Mexican American and Black boys and men in zoot suits, brutally assaulting them. The police mostly didn’t intervene—although they did occasionally arrest the people being beaten. History calls this the Zoot Suit Riots. Chavarria has not forgotten.
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to be appreciative of how struggle makes us stronger, more layered, more interesting, more fabulous. I really have a love for those of us who struggle,” Chavarria tells me, his eyes bright and mischievous. “I just think we’re cooler.”
This story appears in the February 2025 issue of ELLE.