How Willy Chavarria became the designer of the moment | Canada Voices

Rarely has a fashion designer met the moment quite like Willy Chavarria. The Chicano designer, born in Huron, Calif., and now based in New York, is far from new to the game. But over the past year, his work has found itself at the centre of the global fashion conversation.

The impact of Chavarria’s output – and the role it’s played in his ascension – can’t be overstated. Put simply, the designer makes clothes that people want to wear right now, without shying away from the current political reality.

It’s impossible to talk about Chavarria’s clothing without also talking about its influences. The designer draws heavily from Chicano culture and the history of Latino fashion in America. While many of his contemporaries are concerned with reinventing prep or defining quiet luxury, Chavarria pulls inspiration from workwear, zoot suits and 90s athletic apparel. His suiting features cropped hems and thick shoulder pads, made to be worn with pleated work pants and dress shirts with generous sleeves and collars. He plays with proportion, with most of his staples featuring exaggerated silhouettes.

These kinds of pieces can seem intimidating to style, but with celebrities like Jacob Elordi and Colman Domingo adopting the trend, enthusiasts have many references to look to.

A role as one of Adidas’s most visible brand partners has also helped to elevate Chavarria’s station in the fashion industry. His work with the “three stripes” is a rare collaboration that feels like an authentic meeting of voices rather than simply slapping a logo on some tried-and-true brand staples. The line of T-shirts and tracksuits matches the exaggerated fits and proportions of Chavarria’s main line, with the shoes – however impressive they may be – often feeling like an afterthought.

This month, the designer released a collection with Adidas for NBA All-Star Weekend, featuring collaborations with former league MVP James Harden and equestrian collective the Compton Cowboys. The drop includes luxe wool pinstripe tracksuits, hoodies featuring the Mexican flag and a standout pair of black leather Superstar sneakers adorned with steel-toe caps and rose embellishments meant to evoke classic rodeo boots.

The partnership, in addition to elevating Chavarria’s profile, also makes the designer’s clothes – luxury items with a price point to match – more accessible to everyday shoppers.

The same goes for Big Willy, an affordable sub-brand launched earlier this year. Like the Adidas line, Big Willy offers the main brand’s signature style at a steep discount, largely sticking to workwear staples like thick chinos and boxy black or white tees.

Endeavours like this, when executed well, can provide ambitious designers with an income base from which they can pursue more cutting-edge work under their main line. In an ideal world, Big Willy and the Adidas partnership can do for Chavarria what Essentials has done for his colleague Jerry Lorenzo’s Fear of God: generate steady revenue while assimilating his aesthetic into contemporary fashion and streetwear.

What has really made Chavarria stand out over the past year, however, is his relentless messaging around the experiences of modern Latinos in America. His show at Paris Fashion Week last January, titled Tarantula, coincided with the second inauguration of U.S. President Donald Trump. Taking centre stage at the Paris event – a historically white institution – with a show featuring Latino, queer and BIPOC models wearing clothes reflecting their cultures made waves in the fashion industry and beyond.

His follow-up this past June, Huron, featured models representing prisoners in ICE detention facilities, dressed in T-shirts made in partnership with the ACLU. Ahead of the show, Chavarria told GQ, “We’re living in a time with the most horrifying atrocities happening all around us and what we’re seeing is the erasure of cultures, the erasure of people, the erasure of education, the erasure of compassion, and the erasure of identity. So it’s very important for me in this collection to amplify, show presence, and claim reason for being.”

In interviews, Chavarria often speaks about dignity and every person’s right to it as the core thesis of his work. That theme was again the focus last month at his most recent show, Eterno, at Dojo de Paris. The presentation was a celebration of Latino culture, history and day-to-day life through a series of cheeky vignettes, which incorporated lowriders, bicycle gangs and performances by boy band Latin Mafia and Colombian superstar Feid.

Fashion can often feel like an apolitical space, especially in Paris. Chavarria’s refusal to back down from the moment has cemented him as a generational talent – one for whom it’s clear this is only the beginning.