Paris —
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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.
