“The first thought was joy. I knew I wanted to do a collection full of hope.” This was Willy Chavarria speaking backstage after a show whose powerful opening symbolism had left people sobbing. Thirty-five men dressed uniformly in outsize white T-shirts had entered and knelt, one by one, with their hands behind their backs. It was a gut-wrenching symbolic enactment in support of ACLU, for which Chavarria is a vocal ally, in reference to Salvadoran prisons where people are being profiled and persecuted with no due process. This was the terminology in the press release, but events in California have moved on, badly, since Chavarria and his team flew to Paris for the show.
“Today and as of yesterday, ICE is attacking the town of Huron,” he said in front of cameras. “There are tanks rolling through the streets, and there are armed militia surrounding homes. So it’s a state of horror. The opening piece was to contrast against the beauty of the people that are actually being kidnapped and shipped away, broken away from their families, the chaos that we’re seeing right now.”
Huron, a small and poor city in Fresno County, is Chavarria’s hometown, and this collection, bursting with style and vibrant color, was a celebration of the place and the people he grew up among. He’s not been back there for years until recently, when the editor in chief of A Magazine Curated By, Blake Abbie, asked him to go back and shoot a story for the edition that Chavarria had guest edited. Huron is the name of his spring collection.
The demonstration isn’t captured in Vogue Runway’s pictures, but the full force of the uplifting color—eau de nil, red, pink, yellow, turquoise—sings off the screen. “It’s color as an act of rebellion,” said Chavarria. A swaggering glamour was owned by the men in their drapey, outsize Chilango suit cuts and the women playing hot and haute in their pencil skirts, fitted shirtdresses, slick leather trench coats, vertiginous pumps, and ankle-strap sandals. (A collaboration with the classic French brand Charles Jourdan is in the offing.)
“It’s been a very intentional womenswear growth for me, from both a creative and business perspective,” he said. “With my last collection, I brought on head of design Rebecca Mendoza, who’s an exquisite womenswear designer. I wasn’t going to design womenswear until I had the right woman to design it with because I don’t want womenswear from a men’s perspective. We work very closely to define this beauty that is respectful of the classics but very modernized in the way the constructions are really built to graze the body, not hug the body.”
The vibrant color palette was backed up by a distinct haute couturish use of cloque and duchesse satin, but Chavarria’s choices carried a zinger of a subtext. “They were actually derived from factory-worker uniforms globally. There’s green and this red we see in some countries, mostly oppressive countries, but ironically. Yet when you put all these colors together, they look very preppy and joyful. And it really started to make me think about this preppy narrative that’s supposed to claim luxury because of its social status. So,” he concluded, “I want to show luxury in a new way. Who’s to tell us who can wear luxury?”
Midway, there was a change of scene with the entrance of Chavarria’s Adidas Originals collab collection, which he said was designed around Los Angeles. “I really wanted it to resonate in Los Angeles street culture because that’s had such an impact on fashion, so I wanted to pay homage to that.” The logos and graphics, including one reading “Chavarria Global Unification,” were designed by the LA tattoo artist Sal Preciado. “We did this five months ago. Now it turns out LA is another city under attack.”
Bringing these messages to Europe opens eyes. Chavarria is not alone in speaking up through fashion, but he is one of the most eloquent and intentional to have emerged in the last few years. Where others have muted themselves, Chavarria just gets more heroically vocal. An American reporter in the crowd asked if he had any “concerns” around speaking out. “With regard to activism and politics, I honestly feel that regardless of what we do, we’re being political,” he replied. “Not saying something is much louder than saying something. So for me I have no choice. We have no choice but to defend ourselves.”
