Willy Chavarria: ‘We’re still so stuck in fashion‘s old guard’

As part of the August 2025 ‘Made in America’ issue of Wallpaper* we tasked three powerful voices from the worlds of design, fashion and architecture – Murray Moss, Willy Chavarria and Florencia Rodriguez – with delivering their own state of the nation address, speaking on themes of creativity and community in turbulent times. Here, Willy Chavarria – a fashion designer with an activist heart – talks creative resilience and shaking up fashion’s old guard.

My team and I approach every collection from a point of view of reacting to the political climate. The conversation is always: How does the world feel? What’s happening? How should we respond to it? Then we start pulling together ideas, thoughts and images – everything that’s inspiring us. For the latest A/W25 collection, which we showed in Paris earlier this year, there was a lot of civil rights imagery; strong, powerful figures from past and present. Everyone from Sinéad O’Connor to Indya Moore. These are people who are just gorgeous, but part of their beauty is their strength in speaking truth to power; they capture this feeling of resistance. The images reminded us all of how cool they are.

Willy Chavarria on shaking up fashion’s old guard

The last six months have been such a dark time in America. It’s been heavy, very heavy. There are days when, in the studio, we just have to act as a support group, because some days feel unbelievable. The closer it gets to all of us, the scarier it feels. So something that we do – that the brand does – is that, aside from design, we’ve been working with organisations that are out there spending all of their time focusing on civil rights. We’ve developed close relationships with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), and other organisations like that. We want to make sure that the work we do integrates their work – because when we are doing our jobs in design, we don’t always know the best way to organise. So having these groups that deal with this stuff every day is helpful.

We give back to them by giving them a platform – fashion is consumed by so many people right now, more than ever before. So it’s a powerful way to pass on their messaging and to remind people what’s right. I think with fashion, music and art, they are a way of communicating some of these big messages in a way that’s easy for people to ingest. Because if you go to somebody and start saying, ‘Oh, the ACLU is doing these protests’ or whatever, people usually tune out because it’s everywhere in our face. But if we can tell stories that really touch people through our art, then it has an impact. That’s what I’m trying to focus on.

We held the Paris show in the American Church on Quai d’Orsay. I wanted it to be in a church because there’s a historical thing where the church has rejected so many people, and not welcomed them. I wanted to show that everyone is welcome, and to do that in a church seemed like the most pronounced way of showing queer people, trans people, in this environment where they were the saints. A lot of the show was street cast in Paris, and then we had the people you see over and over in our shows – they work with us, moving tables, putting up boards, and then they also walk in the show. And there were friends like J Balvin, Indya Moore, Honey Dijon and Kai-Isaiah Jamal, who are also celebrities – I like including those people because they amplify our voice.

We used Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon asking Trump to ‘have mercy’ towards immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community as the soundtrack to the end of the show. His inauguration was taking place the same week, but we were too busy, and nobody here was going to want to watch anyway. A friend of mine, Brooke Bobb from Harper’s Bazaar, came by and said: ‘You gotta see this – whatever you are doing, just make sure you watch it’. So we did, it was late at night, and the whole team was just like ‘holy cow’. It was so beautiful, and it fell exactly in line with what we were doing. The next day, we changed the ending of the show. It was so powerful in rehearsal that most of the models were in tears.

In my collections, I’m still always drawn to an American aesthetic, although it’s something that I’m evolving. Something I’ve done in the past isn’t always something I’ll be doing in the future. But one thing I always want to highlight is the influence on brown people in fashion, which hasn’t always been recognised. So I like to highlight things like workwear, or silhouettes that originated through Black and brown people, mostly in America. But I think my next show, which I’ll hold in Paris again, is a little bit of a step towards what I’d call ‘luxury’. Moving the show to Paris as such an American brand was about having a global message – a message of humanity that’s about people in all countries. I wanted to reach more people. It felt amazing to be embraced by Paris in that way.

What gives me hope for the future is that I plan to have an effect on fashion, on the industry. I plan to continue to grow and work with places that will allow me to share my philosophy. I want to help reformat the way things operate, because we’re still so stuck in the old guard of fashion – these people have been doing it for so long that they can’t see outside of their sphere. They are all looking at each other like, ‘What’s going on?’. They keep trying the same old tactics. But there’s room for a transformation of the industry, and I hope to help that along.

As told to Jack Moss.

The August 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands from 10 July 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

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