Borderline Luxury
As LA erupts in protest against federal crackdowns, Willy Chavarria’s runway rebellion reveals the urgent need for a united, thoughtful resistance.
For Spring 2024, Willy Chavarria reimagined The Last Supper with his cast of models — a powerful tableau in these fractured times, urging us to break bread across cultural divides. That same year, upon winning CFDA’s Menswear Designer of the Year for the second time, he declared, “this award is for all of us.” Image sourced via Elinor Kry for Document Journal © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
As the clouds of dark smoke begin to dissipate and the acrid taste of tear gas dissolves beneath the tongue, the city is left with a lasting image of protest: a young man standing atop a vandalised car, shirtless and masked in a black skull-print balaclava. The motif — long a potent symbol in Mexican culture — mirrors the design on his trousers, held up by a metal-studded belt that nods to punk, reinforced by chain-link jewellery and fingerless bone-print gloves. In his raised hand: the Mexican flag, snapping in the wind like a declaration.
This isn’t fashion as costume — it’s uniform as resistance. In the chaos of LA’s recent anti-immigration riots, a new visual language is emerging, rooted in style and survival. And it’s one Willy Chavarria has been codifying for years.
From flipping the American flag upside down on sweaters during his Spring 2019 show — staged at the height of Trump 1.0 nationalism — to drawing from the deep history of Chicano rebellion, Chavarria doesn’t just design clothes, he constructs statements. His aesthetic draws on Chicano (Mexican-American) identity as both archive and arsenal: from the zoot suits of the movement’s ancestral Pachucos to today’s Cholos, Willy’s work weaves ninety years of prideful protest into something unmistakably current.
Willy Chavarria is one of the most thoughtful menswear designers working today. The queer son of a Mexican immigrant father and an Irish Catholic mother, he grew up in the agricultural outskirts of Fresno, California, in the 1970s — raised in the shadow of the American Dream, surrounded by the labourers who form the backbone of the capitalist order.
After cutting his teeth at Ralph Lauren in the early 2000s, Chavarria internalised the codes of American exceptionalism — only to reimagine them through his own voice much later; in 2015, at the seasoned age of 47, he launched his namesake label — not as a naïve debut, but as a fully formed creative and commercial vision, ready to act “as a catalyst for positive change.”
From the outset, Chavarria embedded distinct house codes into his collections. In Spring 2018’s Cruising, Willy mused on the lowrider culture synonymous with Chicano identity, filtered through his own memories of ’80s leathery romance, raves, and drag shows. It marked the beginning of his deeper interrogation of identity politics and hypermasculinity — particularly the machismo projected by young Latino men dressed in crisp white tees and baggy khakis, worn with “a cuff and a crease,” as Dr. Dre famously put it. Chavarria feminised the silhouette, exaggerating proportions until the aggressive posturing softened into something else: vulnerability. Oversized tees read like dresses; wide shorts blurred into skirts. It was the designer’s first real flirtation with political parody.
LEFT: For Spring 2022, Willy Chavarria ventured into couture, reimagining box-pleated khakis as ballgowns for shirtless young men — a masterful play on proportion and silhouette that staged a breathtaking tango between masculinity and femininity. RIGHT: The idea of clothing as protection runs deep in Chavarria’s work — nowhere more so than in his Fall 2023 all-black evening-wear collection; the ‘assassin trench’ shown here envelops the body in supple wool-cashmere, its open front revealing a bare chest that underscores the garment’s cerebral sensuality. Images sourced via Vogue Runway © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
From elevated streetwear to full-on luxury over the brand’s first decade, Willy Chavarria has proven himself both a conscious creative and a master of silhouette. His Spring 2022 show, Cut Deep, established a breakthrough moment — a spectacular exploration of subversive masculinity that opened with a look now permanently housed at the MoMA: the Chiconic box-pleated khakis, elegantly transformed into a couture ballgown, paired with satin boxing shorts visible above the waistline in recognition of the sport’s machismo.
Chavarria brands this collection a milestone because it marries sharp social commentary with masterful manipulation of luxury fabrics to envelop or expose the body, a method that beautifully summons the spirit of master couturier Cristóbal Balenciaga.
Willy’s relationship with luxury deepened further in Fall 2023’s Kangaroo, a collection modelled after the technical brilliance of Latin-American dressmaking pioneer Oscar de la Renta. Known now as the all-black collection, it told “a story of love and protection,” drawing on late 19th-century mourning attire to brood over the state of the world today. Italian velvet double-breasted jackets and silk satin trousers gave the show a dark, romantic mood — equal parts catharsis and technical display — dedicated to Willi Smith, the unsung hero of (African-)American fashion.
When Vanessa Friedman saw Willy Chavarria’s Fall 2024 show, she declared that “politics is back in fashion.” Since then, Chavarria has globalised his revolution with a Paris Fashion Week debut earlier this year, presenting Tarantula — his Fall 2025 collection — staged in an American Cathedral on Parisian soil, a symbolic refuge during the week of Trump’s second inauguration.
The show translated Willy’s anti-oppressive manifesto for a foreign front row of luxury buyers, an audience not lost on the veteran designer who revived some of his greatest commercial hits — even sourcing past designs from eBay — to weave into an extensive line-up of luxurious reinterpretations of Chicano workwear, featuring blood-red velvets, washed silks, and sable black wools. Sunday Mass suits, accessorised with custom rosaries made in Mexico, marched in tandem with Chavarria’s homage to Chanel’s classic tweed suits — a deliberate nod to the house that pioneered the subversion of traditional gender roles in fashion.
Like many of his shows, Tarantula featured a street-cast line-up of ‘Willy Boys’ — muses radiating masculine energy soothed by old-school sensitivity — adding an authentic, familial layer to his message of inclusion.
The previous collection, América, arguably secured Willy’s place on the Paris calendar. Staged beneath a looming American flag on Wall Street — the financial beating heart of the nation — the show honoured the immigrant working class through impeccably tailored uniforms inspired by hotel managers, construction workers, security guards, and foremen. Keys and crucifixes hung from belt loops, symbolising the security and faith these workers cling to within a system deliberately designed to marginalise them. Willy’s critique of exploitative capitalism travelled back to industrial Britain, expressed through his commanding use of Victorian silhouettes — a sharp reading of the origins of this rapacious economic order.
LEFT: Chavarria’s 2025 collections trade avant-garde for commercial appeal; this accessible Spring 2025 look features a branded sweatshirt in Blackletter — a typeface rooted in LA Cholo culture — paired with his signature wide-cut khakis. RIGHT: For his ultra-chic PFW debut, Chavarria fused his Chicano aesthetic with a reimagined tweed jacket — a nod to Gabrielle Chanel, the trailblazer who transformed menswear fabrics into comfortable clothing for women. Images sourced via Vogue Runway © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
The same injustice dramatised in Willy’s América unfolded raw and unfiltered on the streets of Los Angeles last week; as peaceful protesters — alongside a handful of bad actors — confronted the full force of National Guard troops, one image cut through the chaos: the Mexican flag, held high by second- and third-generation immigrants in solidarity with the vast Mexican community that weaves the fabric of the Golden State. Raised as a symbol of pride, resistance, and collective identity against federal hostility, the flag was quickly twisted by detractors into proof of an “insurrectionist mob” and anti-American sentiment. In reality, it was political theatre — staged, misread, and weaponised.
Willy Chavarria’s reflections on his Mexican heritage take more considered forms. In his Spring 2024 collection, New Life, he paired crisp white linen jackets with red roses pinned to the lapel, and gold Italian sequin trousers worn with a graphic tee depicting a saintly Willy Boy cloaked in the colours of the Mexican flag. Viewed narratively, the show traced a pilgrimage from elegance to entropy to enlightenment: pristine compositions gave way to sun-faded tailoring and tattered underwear, culminating in a snowy bridal gown with billowing sleeves and sweeping train — a vision of spiritual purity that closed the drama in true telenovela fashion, long woven into the domestic life of the Latin-American diaspora.
The designer has never shied away from directly engaging with American iconography. But when it comes to Mexico, Willy’s treatment is more nuanced — reverent, symbolic. His work expresses a deeper care for the identity of his ancestors than for his adopted nation. That sensitivity was absent from the protests, where raw symbolism bred misinterpretation and handed the establishment just enough “truth” to peddle the fiction of a foreign invasion.
A rioter fans the flames of rage with the Mexican flag — a burning symbol of resistance against federal immigration raids in Los Angeles last week. Image sourced via CNN, Jim Vondruska, Getty Images © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
Chavarria’s shows often unfold in sanctuaries of worship, grounding his collections in a moral register that infuses meaning into garments otherwise dismissed as aesthetic showboating. He once remarked that “fashion is so stupid when you talk about it,” suggesting that when the industry attempts to explain itself, it often exposes the emptiness behind the façade. A little mystery, Willy implies, is a necessary veil — one that most designers artfully rely on.
It’s why Chavarria’s voice resonates most in moments when the world feels bereft of Godliness. In his Spring 2023 collection, Please Rise, the designer staged a solemn meditation on the violence of closed borders, dividing his models by ethnicity to evoke the creeping threat of homogeneity. One unforgettable image: a buzz-shaven Latino man walking solemnly down the centre aisle of Marble Collegiate Church, dressed in a fine Italian suit with dramatic batwing lapels, clutching a wooden crucifix to his chest — a martyr of modern capitalism, the false prophet that perverts the eternal gospel: faith in fellow man.
