Willy Chavarria’s Américan Dream

Willy Chavarria has had a week. First he opened New York Fashion Week with a runway presentation that funneled a profound commentary on capitalism, organized labor, civil rights, and classism into a 68-look procession through a gutted carcass of a building near the New York Stock Exchange. Then, he and his Spring/Summer 2025 collection were hailed by Vanessa Friedman as one of the new faces of American fashion.

The collection, called América, reinterpreted silhouettes rooted in Mexican American culture, letting each shine through the lens of his tailoring prowess and the swaggering bravado of models whose day jobs include construction work, car detailing, and winning Olympic gold medals. Forget subtlety—it was a staggering display of vision, technical skill, world-building, and sheer originality that is poised to propel Chavarria and his namesake label to boundary-breaking heights. After all, on a Willy runway, a tracksuit isn’t a tracksuit at all—it’s Italian cotton-linen tailoring executed as if it were sportswear. (Lest you forget, an emphatic “It’s luxury, darling,” from Chavarria will do well to remind you.)

Scarcely a week later, Chavarria received his third consecutive nomination for the CFDA’s Menswear Designer of the Year award. “Is it my third nomination?” he asked, surprised, the day after the news broke. He’s been a bit busy: he and his team have been working at breakneck pace photographing the América collection for e-commerce, fielding orders for everything from his tailoring to his new Adidas collaboration and custom commissions, preparing for the release of Dirty Willy, an adult art zine, to promote his new underwear line, putting the architecture in place for a direct-to-consumer benefit collection for the United Farm Workers, the list goes on.

Last year Chavarria left his longtime role overseeing menswear at Calvin Klein. In the interim, he seems to have invested many times over in soulfully guiding his own brand’s growth. Instead of a billboard campaign, he launched his underwear collection with a Barney’s pop-up and packaged Dirty Willy as a little black book. He inked a major deal with Adidas, with whom he designed 22 runway looks and reimagined the brand’s Jabbar sneaker, which 27-year-old Olympic gold-winning 100-meter sprinter Noah Lyles wore to close Chavarria’s Spring/Summer 2025 runway show. And, while his collections are always ungendered, two gauzy gowns he showed during fashion week have brought womenswear buyers—which translates to greater reach and opportunities—calling.

Surface caught up with Chavarria in the midst of what is doubtlessly an inflection point in the designer’s career to talk world-building, awards, and fashion as a medium of truth-telling.

You were just nominated for your third consecutive CFDA award.

Is it my third? When I won [in 2022] I thought, “Wow. Change is happening if people are really seeing the value of what it is we do here.”

What is that value, in your eyes?

It’s a matter of weaving social messaging and fashion together. For me, fashion has always been political. We often measure the markings of history through what people wore throughout time. What we’re doing is different, because we acknowledge the world for what it is, and build clothes that work into what the world is now. It’s very truthful. From a business perspective it’s very good, because you really communicate with the customer.

On that note, choosing Adidas as a collaborator felt very deliberate given its roots in soccer culture, our culture. Were you also thinking about expanding the brand’s reach in terms of price point?

As the brand grows, I do want to make sure that we are always able to offer a range of price points so that no one feels excluded. Some of the tailoring, it’s very expensive to make, and then you have to wholesale it, then they have their markup, so it ends up being very expensive. There are people that can afford that, and that’s great, but at the same time, I want to be able to offer things that my family can afford. We never want to be a super exclusive brand. And also, I love the context Adidas has in our culture.

In the same way you’re very selective about your collaborations, you’re known to be very selective about celebrity partners. Tell me about having Noah Lyles close your runway show.

Noah and I had not met before. We usually have something of a relationship with someone before they walk the show. Noah was brand new, and his spirit is so cool. He’s so funny, so nice and chill and his girlfriend was there too. She’s also a two-time gold medalist. I thought it would be amazing to close the show with this new generation of Americans.

This collection has gotten a lot of attention for its reinterpretation of workwear styles that are stereotypically associated with our community. Why were those themes so prevalent, and in your tailoring especially?

It was a story of America. I did want to show the classism between the different ways of dressing, the different segmentations of the country, but all of us in the same place, under that same flag, and still working for the man, in a way. Even me. The logo [on the uniform looks] is Fine Fashion Services, so I’m still in the service community, just making clothes for people. It puts us all on the same level in some way.

Luxury fashion has long left the Latino market untapped. It hasn’t been a priority, and you don’t generally see people who look like us at the highest levels of this industry. Outside of your brand, do you see that changing?

I think to some degree it is starting to change. The Black Lives Matter movement actually helped a lot. It caused people to open up their doors when they were closed before. I’m fully aware that I’ve taken advantage of that openness in my own business, and I just want to make sure that I am able to open the doors for others.