“I don’t believe in limitations on what a designer can do,” Willy Chavarria says. “There’s a vast flexibility within my work and my future.”
The child of a Mexican immigrant father and an Irish mother, Chavarria, 56, was raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where he was a keen observer of the subtleties of stylistic expression in his community. “I didn’t even think of it as fashion, but I was obsessed with how people presented themselves,” he says, speaking on the phone from his studio in Brooklyn. “As I got older, I realized that you could connect with cultures and groups of people via the way you dress.” Though he could document local trends in his sketchbook, Chavarria realized that if he wanted to interact with like-minded creatives, he’d have to leave home. “In that small-town environment, magazines and film become your escapism,” he says. “I immersed myself in that, but I knew I would eventually have to leave and go where I could find beauty.”
That search led him to San Francisco in the mid-1990s. He became a part of the club scene and found a job at Joe Boxer, the underwear label known for its smiley-face graphics and cheeky advertising. “I started in the stockroom and worked my way up,” Chavarria says. “The job was a big deal for me, but it was also an incredible time to be in San Francisco. You had rave culture from the U.K., house music from Chicago, and techno converging in one area. The nightlife was incredibly fashionable and remains one of my biggest influences.” That raver aesthetic pops up in Chavarria’s self-titled line, launched in 2015, in the form of fluorescent knitwear and mesh tops; other important references include the loose, low-slung trousers he spotted on the streets in the early ’90s.
From left: Hiandra Martinez and Montero wear looks from Willy Chavarria’s fall 2023 collection.
In 1999, after a brief time in a California beach town where he traded clubbing for triathlons and worked…
Read the full article here
