Willy Chavarria Spring 2020 Menswear

Woolmark Prize nominee (and Copenhagen resident) Willy Chavarria returned to the runway circuit for Spring 2020, having skipped the Fall 2019 season. “I mean...summer, scheduling, it was the right time to get back. But I also think it doesn’t necessarily need to be a show, season after season.”

He’s a fringe figure in New York City fashion, and he’s benefitted from keeping an arm’s-length attitude as his profile has grown. With Spring, he went for a “new take” on minimalism, but one that pulled from a transcontinental party scene in the ’90s—particularly a nightclub he used to run in San Francisco called The Love Garage, which would see an influx of a more New York–centric clientele and wardrobe.

“Everything became a little slicker and darker.” Part one of this collection featured long jackets in black satin, mesh shirts in black, generously cut jeans in extra-processed washes, and a top that graphically spelled out “Breaking News,” befitting of...well, the hyper-evolution of the 24-hour news cycle from Chavarria’s chosen timeframe right up to yesterday’s latest Mueller hearing. The second portion of his lineup saw a collaboration with K-Swiss, which Chavarria called an “aspirational brand as a kid growing up in California,” and here the mood turned to late-’80s-workout-video neons and layering. These pieces will sell, but the first half was stronger.

Chavarria’s most notable strength rests in his calibration of queerness and masculinity (especially so when that calibration involves his Chicano background). Yet there is something resolutely femme, too, in the afterburn. He mentioned that gender fluidity doesn’t have to be androgynous or genderless. These clothes had that code in place; satin dressing-room bombers over bare, muscled chests, or cropped boxy shirts as tops, worn with the aforementioned denim.

In some ways, you could see hints of what the men wear on the current hit TV show Pose, though that program takes place a few years earlier than the ’90s. But the look, and its progression, absolutely resonates now. Chavarria is a smart, worldly creative who knows how to be all-inclusive while still carving out his own distinct M.O.; it all feels very true.