WORKING MAN Chic
How high-end designer celebrates quietly heroic laborers
The firefighters rush into the hotel lobby in full battle gear, laden with axes and oxygen canisters, but find no fire, no smoke, no nothing. The false alarm leaves a half-dozen of this city’s bravest loitering amid the velvet-covered club chairs and in the direct sightline of Willy Chavarria.
The menswear designer, perched on the edge of a leather sofa, gazes admiringly at their scarred helmets, the oversize yellow-striped coats.
He eyes the elongated hem at the back of the heavy jackets where each man’s name is stamped. How had he missed that detail all these years?
Now he starts rhapsodizing about the road crew he spotted just outside the hotel. “They were wearing these super-weathered Carhartt jeans and neon safety jackets over super washed-out T-shirts,” Chavarria says.
Work wear is Chavarria’s inspiration and his passion; don’t be surprised to find versions of safety jackets or firefighter helmets in his next collection. Chavarria isn’t out to transform a pair of trousers into an avant-garde art project. Instead, he wants to elevate and celebrate what already exists. Not just the clothes, but the quietly heroic laborers, the many black and brown men, who wear them.
In part, that’s because these fellas are him — a brown-skinned man who grew up working class. His clothes are in honor of men who are misunderstood and feared, if not literally, then metaphorically. Some
people are frightened of being robbed by them; others fret about the country being defined by them.
And, of course, his clothes are for the pure pleasure of fashion. Chavarria, 51, personally and professionally favors a big silhouette. He produces some of the most socially engaging runway shows in New York, inspired by Chicano street culture and gay leather bars, and by “13th,” Ava DuVernay’s documentary on mass incarceration.
For spring 2019, he focused on immigrants. “I love how people from other places enter a new world and really turn it out with their clothes,” he says. “I love how Mexicans and Chicanos will take work clothes, just plain clothes, and make it beautiful: a pressed white T-shirt, pressed khakis and a black belt. That’s high fashion.”
His ode to immigrant style, presented in an industrial studio space in the Meatpacking District, opened with an appetizer: a diverse group of models stretching and jogging and sweating in brightly colored soccer gear, a collaboration with the Danish sportswear label Hummel. Chavarria liked the idea of his label being stocked at Footlocker, as well as an upmarket store such as Barneys New York. If he’s going to be inspired by blue-collar men, he wants them to afford his clothes. All of his garments have a thumbnail-size label that reads: “Capitalism is heartless.” Speaking to the mass market is his way of trying to make that sentiment a little less true.
In choosing models for the main course, he wasn’t focused on diversity as much as destiny. He said he wanted his guys to collectively represent the “man of the future.” For inspiration, he turned to the late 1990s, when East Coast men swaggered in Timberlands while West Coast guys looked like fireplugs in oversize everything. He luxurified it all with better fabrics, intentional silhouettes and the imprimatur of high-fashion desirability.