Willy Chavarria’s creative nucleus has always spun around the idea of America. Not as it’s been so tediously explored in the past—reliant on a hero fantasy that grows more and more distant from reality by the day—but as a country that breathes cultural diversity. As the political climate in the United States grows darker, Chavarria’s mission grows more urgent.

The show blurred the lines between performance, activism, and fashion. The invitations were presented as deportation papers, the same kind thousands of Americans and legal residents receive every day under Trump’s authoritarian-like command.

The show opened with a stirring performance. Thirty-five men dressed in white T-shirts entered the venue one by one, leaning along the runway. As they got to their place, they kneeled, hands behind their backs. In partnership with the ACLU, the opening was a call to action on the current human rights violations ongoing in Salvadoran prisons, where the justice system has ceased to exist in the way we know it, prosecuting and convicting people with no judicial process.

The peculiarity of what Chavarria does is that his brand’s political existence isn’t a side mission; it’s its core. Beyond the performance that opened the show (and that left many in the audience teary-eyed), his message is woven through his design language beautifully. The colour palette itself, which without context reads as joyful, was inspired by the uniforms of factory workers around the world. Light pinks, bright reds, and cold greens are all contextualised in a social and cultural reality, appearing throughout the collection in Chavarria’s signature tailoring, with oversized proportions and sharp, pointy edges.

Womenswear was particularly strong this season, a fact Chavarria confessed backstage was due to the growth of his team. With Rebecca Mendoza as head of design, Chavarria begins speaking a different womenswear language. Oversized trench coats don’t swallow the body, they amplify it. Short-sleeved shirts and pencil skirts define the silhouette, tucking the waist ever so slightly in. His omnipresent Adidas collaboration lightened the collection midway through, giving us a taste of the ever-desirable Willy boys.

Chavarria continues to redefine not only American fashion. In his hands, the runway becomes about more than clothes. It’s an altar for appreciation and retaliation.

Words by Pedro Vasconcelos

WILLY CHAVARRIA SS26

ARchive

LATEST