Willy Chavarria is having a great year. The Chicano designer received the menswear designer of the year award on Monday at the CFDA Fashion Awards, which was presented to him by J Balvin and Greg Lauren at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. This past weekend in the Dominican Republic, Chavarria took the designer of the year award at the inaugural Latin American Fashion Awards. In a moment of serendipity, J Balvin received the Latin American style icon award that same evening, wearing none other than Willy Chavarria.
“It feels like I’m having my moment,” Chavarria says ahead of the awards at The Standard High Line hotel. “To be recognized by my peers really means something; to win something like this is the biggest affirmation of my work.”
But this is only one of Chavarria’s moments, at least according to the Puerto Rican artist Rauw Alejandro, who, alongside Dominican rapper Tokischa, joined Chavarria at the awards. “You can have more than a moment, you have a peak now, but you will have many more,” says Rauw, who is enjoying a peak himself. He just wrapped a tour for his latest album, and yesterday he dropped a video for one of his latest songs, “Diluvio.” In the video, he is wearing a pair of trousers by, you guessed it, Willy Chavarria.
But the pair share more than a synchronicity in their careers; they also happen to both share similar views on masculinity. Through Chavarria’s unabashedly romantic menswear and Rauw’s alluring public persona, the two have helped redefine what a Latino man looks like today. “He reminds me of myself when I was his age, the way he carries himself with such confidence and with a sexuality that comes naturally,” Chavarria says of Rauw. “There are a lot of people who see masculinity as toxic because there is toxic masculinity, but not all masculinity has to be, so it’s important to celebrate this new, more open, more loving kind of masculinity.”
Rauw credits this to growing up with only women in his house—his mother, grandmother, and sister. “I developed a sensitivity that I still keep while being masculine and the man of the house, but they helped me be the man that I am. I try not to play into the masculinity that can be so toxic that we also see in reggaeton culture too. I like to find a balance between the romance and the explicit stuff—there’s not just one way. The same thing applies to fashion,” the rapper explains. “I can have something like a crop top on, and I’m still me, and I’m still masculine.”
Chavarria and Rauw are pushing culture forward by showcasing a new wave of Latino masculinity, but they are also focused on finding ways to evolve personally and professionally in the process. “I try to not be singled out as being only ‘a reggaeton guy.’ I feel like the new way of music is that we can do more now,” Rauw says. “I find it that, when people try to keep themselves limited to a certain type of music, it gets old very fast.”
This idea resonates with Chavarria, who has, over the last couple of seasons, focused his designs on elegance and sophistication without doing away with the diverse point of view that put him on the map many years ago. “The more I mature and the more I grow, the more nuances I am able to insert into my work to keep myself going—otherwise it just stays stagnant,” the designer says.
The awards were Rauw’s first fashion event in this capacity. The rapper explained that he’s never partnered with a designer like this, instead working with his stylist or attending shows as a guest rather than as a partner or ambassador because he tends to just “live in his own world.” So why now, and why Chavarria? “When I saw Willy’s work around two years ago, I felt really connected to it aesthetically and as a Latino. Willy is doing different stuff than other designers, the models, the fit, the feel of his shows.” Plus, regardless of the fact that Rauw is Puerto Rican and Chavarria Chicano, they’re both Latino, and there’s a kinship and familial bond all Latinos share, particularly in the diaspora.
“I keep saying to myself, our time is now, Latinos are winning,” Rauw says, with Chavarria adding, “but it’s also about time, what took so long?” Last night both men wore Chavarria’s signature broad-shouldered tailoring with matching rosettes and black leather gloves—an exercise between balancing the explicit sexuality and the romance Rauw says he enjoys imbuing in his music.
It was the first time that Rauw Alejandro wore head-to-toe red, but the artist knows his way around making a fashion statement. As for Chavarria, he took home his second award in less than a week. Just like it happened to him in the Dominican Republic, he lost his pre-drafted speech before taking the stage, but his words came from the heart: “I think it’s important for us to incorporate humanity into what we do. Fashion has always been so much about glamour, which we all want to do, but we can still do that by loving one another.”
