Willy Chavarria Is Messing With Americana

In 1978, when the fashion designer Willy Chavarria was 10 years old, he and his family attended a production of Zoot Suit, a play by Luis Valdez. The work drew from the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon Murder, when the death of a partygoer became the pretext for a wider criminalization of Chicano youth in Los Angeles. Hundreds were brought in for processing and 22 indicted. On trial was the pachuco, young Chicanos who spoke caló, a patois of Spanish and English, and whose style held the posture of dissent: zoot suits with high and tight waists, pleated legs, and long jackets; swinging chains; and hair slicked back into pompadours with a feathered Borsalino. The look was big and swaggy, and lawmakers considered the liberal use of fabric unpatriotic during wartime. In the play, the pachuco is a trickster figure who warns the audience of the impossibility of total assimilation; he is neither Mexican or American but “a new creation.”

The pachuco spirit has not left Chavarria since. At 58, he has worked in the industry for more than 30 years at the biggest companies, including Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, and Calvin Klein. He started his namesake brand ten years ago, well past the age when most people take creative risks; his ambition is to become “the next Ralph.” His collections often draw inspiration from his old employers, playing around with the iconography of the American flag. But if Ralph Lauren projects a fantasy of what writer Judith Thurman calls “an idealization of the Waspy American dream,” Chavarria starts from the penumbra. He is more interested in how the streets wear Polo than Polo itself. How do you style yourself with the raw parts of Americana? For him, a bright-white T-shirt tucked into ironed chinos with a black belt is still the peak of looking good. The resulting aesthetic is distinctly American with an ironic distance, like bulbous polo tees, parachute pants, and graphics that read AMÉRICA. “I think it’s fun to pretend like we’re cunty and rich,” he says. “Those clothes have a totally different relevance because of the context they’re in. One of the things I do is challenge the idea of Who’s allowed to wear these clothes? Who belongs in these clothes? ”

Over the summer in Paris, Chavarria debuted his spring 2026 collection, which marks an ambitious expansion of the Willyverse. At the end of the show, Chavarria walked out wearing one of his suits in a light-catching ultramarine blue. He did not do the bashful wave and prayer hands of a designer content to stay behind the scenes. He soaked up the moment, with models on both arms, holding a bouquet of red roses to deliver to his parents in the front row.

He named the collection “Huron,” after one of the small agricultural towns in California’s Central Valley, where he grew up. There are 73 looks, including a third devoted to womenswear, a full accessories line, an ongoing Adidas collaboration, and shoes with Charles Jourdan. The inspiration began, he says, with “a rebellious form of color.” Mint, bubblegum, butter, and electric blue shot through his trademark silhouettes: the oversize yet tailored suits, Veterano shirts, and shorts that pool past the knees. His women wore sleek pencil skirts with sharp shoulders and pinched waists as well as menswear. He experimented with texture, including cloqué, which has a blistered effect, and cotton woven with Inox, a threaded metal, which lends it a permanent insouciance. The collection began to gain a sense of humor. “A real kind of over-the-top preppy turn,” he says. “Like Martha’s Vineyard, if the Mexicans took it over.”

Chavarria is a gregarious force — dishy, playful, fun. He has a quick familiarity with anyone who comes through the studio, easily doling out hugs, daps, laughs, and kisses. He’s stylish with a patrician air, with his gold aviator glasses and a horseshoe mustache. His hair used to be long, but he has shorn the sides and slicked it back. David Ramirez, his husband and the COO and general manager of his brand, likens him to the Pied Piper, “who never ages in his heart and his soul” and has “no concept of money.” The fashion world has heard his call. Chavarria has won the CFDA Fashion Award for Best Menswear Designer for two years running. He wore zoot suits with Maluma at this year’s Met Gala, and Kendrick Lamar wore a Willy track jacket for the “Not Like Us” video and launched a Super Bowl collaboration with him. Jenna Ortega and Pamela Anderson have worn the most recent collection for their respective press tours, as did Shakira on a stop on her current world tour.

Like Wales Bonner or Martine Rose, Chavarria is still a designer for those in the know. To be a successful American brand requires scaling up, holding the attention of the elite while expanding the market through diffusion lines — secondary sub-brands at lower price points — in a delicate balance of commerce and relevance. American fashion has lost many of its lodestars: We’re long past the halcyon days of Michael Kors and Donna Karan or the more recent era of Rodarte, Jason Wu, and Alexander Wang. Ralph Lauren is arguably the only brand to have stayed relevant in both the luxury and mass markets up to the current moment.

Chavarria hopes to fill the vacuum. He’s open about his ambitions: He wants to design Team USA’s outfits for the upcoming Olympic Games in Los Angeles. He’s planning on launching a diffusion line. Currently, his clothes are on the luxury end: $1,900 for a wool blazer, graphic tees ranging from $100 to $400. But what differentiates Chavarria from other lifestyle brands is the consistent insertion of politics into his work. As he sees it, fashion should espouse a worldview. From the outset, his shows have featured dramatic political statements; he sews the phrase CAPITALISM IS HEARTLESS in some of his clothes “as a reminder to carve out space for those left behind on the margins of global power,” he wrote in an essay for the New York Times. “American fashion is a hyper-capitalist industry, but capitalism’s shortcomings are what allow my purpose to exist in this industry.”

Nevertheless, to catapult himself into the mass market requires corporate heft, and he’s done multiple collaborations with brands like Dickies, Pacsun, Hummel, and K-Swiss. The latest and largest, with Adidas, allows him to “touch more people,” he has said. It’s the age-old symbiotic relationship of the artist and the moneyman: Adidas accesses Chavarria’s cachet with Latino communities; he rides its global reach and factory power.

Perhaps inevitably, the collaboration is experiencing its first growing pains. In August, Adidas and Chavarria unveiled footwear based on the huarache, an artisanal sandal with a deep precolonial history. Chavarria described the shoe as an homage to “one of the most classic Chicano references with the white sock.” One person’s inspiration is another’s appropriation. The reaction on the part of the Oaxacan and national governments (and, later, Michoacán) was swift and unsparing. President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said the design was “usurping the creativity” of Indigenous communities and stated that her country was looking into legal action because the huarache is a protected cultural commodity. Chavarria issued an apology, saying he was sorry the shoe was “not developed in direct and meaningful partnership with the Oaxacan community.”

The controversy animates larger questions around appropriation, ownership, and power as well as Chavarria’s own role as a designer who pulls from Chicano and queer culture. Appropriation is one of the building blocks of contemporary fashion. Prada was similarly accused of cultural theft when it debuted sandals inspired by the Indian Kolhapuri chappal during its spring 2026 show. What differentiates Willy Chavarria from Prada, besides the obvious difference in scale, is that Chavarria positions his brand as one that should know better. He invites a level of scrutiny that most fashion brands never risk because they rarely venture to be about anything other than clothes. At Men’s Fashion Week in Paris, you would be hard-pressed to think that anything else was going on in the world other than thong sandals and big shorts. What happens when you pop the bubble?

Willy Chavarria is the second in his line — his father is also named William. With his family, he goes by his middle name, Bradley. He’s the only child to a white mother and Chicano father who grew up in nearby but segregated towns. Gwen Chavarria’s parents didn’t approve of their relationship early on. “My father was a horrible bigot,” she tells me. They were studying at Fresno State when she became pregnant with Willy. When she gave birth, she moved in with her husband’s family in Huron, a small but predominantly Latino town. They went back and forth between cities; William would work on farms on the weekends and holidays in Huron while taking classes in Fresno, where the family lived in government housing. His mother learned to speak Spanish and roll masa. “We were very, very poor,” says Gwen.

When Willy was around 5, the family moved to Visalia, a bigger city nearby where William got a job at the hospital lab. By Chavarria’s own estimation, he was a strange kid, a loner, without a sense of a broader horizon. “I was considered to be very different, almost freakish,” he says. Being mixed was part of it. Before high school, he decided enough was enough; he would adopt a new persona as the popular guy. He succeeded. He dated cheerleaders and was homecoming king. “I pretended like I was somebody else for four years,” he says. “It was awful.” When he walked during graduation, the student body stood up and cheered. “I think that he wants to do penance for trying to make himself popular to a whole white group of people,” says Gwen.

It was the early ’80s, and he was also dealing with his sexuality, which was wrapped in complete secrecy. “I don’t know how bad this is, but teachers and janitors,” he says of his early sexual partners. “As a 16-year-old — how do I phrase this? For many gays of my generation, we didn’t know anything about our sexualities; we just didn’t learn about it. So if there was somebody there to share it with you and validate that it’s a thing and it exists, there was a real positive aspect to that. I only have the best thoughts about it, to tell you the truth.”

After high-school graduation, he wandered. He fled to San Francisco, where he met a friend whom he volunteered with at an orphanage in Negril, Jamaica. They were there for a few months before leaving for Florida. As they made their way back to the Bay Area, he stopped in New Orleans, where he lived for about a year. He did odd jobs. He built furniture. He hustled. “People do it when they need to. I’m a supporter of the sex industry, and I have no shame in it,” he says. “It is like therapy. I learned a lot about my own sexuality, and I learned about other people. It was both self-exploration and just a job.”

He went to New York, then Boston. One day, he walked into a church, where one of the parishioners, a former priest named Father Doug, took him in. He must have been looking rough, a lost lamb with a ratty backpack. He lived with Father Doug and his family for a while. They were traditional; the mother kept the home. He did Bible study with Father Doug in the evenings, which became their own kind of nightly confessional. He was struggling with Catholic guilt, trying to square his identity with the conservative interpretations of Scripture he had been brought up with. Father Doug recommended he meet a friend of his, a monk-in-training who knew about this stuff, which is how he ended up living in a monastery. “He’s the one who made me feel like, It’s okay; I’m not going to hell,” he says. “And then he sucked my dick.” He lets out a little giggle. Every Chavarria story has these dense tangles of personality and emotion. “It sounds more fascinating talking to you about it,” he says. “But it’s just like … it’s life.”

Chavarria learned fashion entirely on the job. When he made it back to San Francisco in 1991, he worked in the stockroom at Joe Boxer. It was a small team of around 20 people with a loose, freewheeling culture. He cleared cigarette butts and hung around the designers long enough to convince them to let him join the team. “We had this camaraderie that was like, Let’s break all the rules,” says Nicholas Graham, the founder and CEO. “And Willy was always up for that.” Chavarria got heavily into clubbing and the rave scene. “Methamphetamine killed the house scene, and I saw a lot of my friends disappear that way,” he says. He absconded to Seattle, where he worked at the Eagle, the city’s oldest leather bar. He was 25 and “got involved with the underworld.” He keeps the specifics to himself.

After about a year, he moved to Pismo Beach and became a health nut. “I said, Okay, my exploratory time is done. I am going to rebuild myself into the person that I need to be,” he says. “Clean mind, clean spirit.” He began training for triathlons, running in the morning and swimming after work, eating chicken and legumes. He got a job as a designer at Voler, a cycling-apparel company. “The world acted in my favor the whole way along because I’m alive,” he says. Ralph Lauren was beginning its activewear line, RLX, at the time and contracted out Voler to make its cycling gear. In 1999, Chavarria moved to New York to work on RLX and, over the next few years, hopped around the company working on textiles, design, and patternmaking. He worked late into the night, showering at the New York Sports Club across the street. “I didn’t really enjoy it, but it was some hard-core training,” he says. “I learned so much about the industry. I learned about luxury. I learned about the politics of the design world.”

Chavarria met his future husband and business partner, David Ramirez, one night in the winter of 2002 at Wonderbar, a gayish bar in the East Village where Club Cumming is now. Ramirez was dancing in the middle of the club smoking a cigarette. He noticed Chavarria, who was sitting on a long bench with his shirt off, displaying an “eight-pack,” says Ramirez, who at the time was working as a gemologist at Zale. Chavarria motioned for a cigarette and Ramirez came over. They went out bar-hopping that night, and Ramirez convinced him to go home with him to Carroll Gardens, back when Manhattanites balked at crossing the East River: “And he came to Brooklyn every night thereafter.”

In 2004, Chavarria joined American Eagle Outfitters as senior design director, where he launched what would become the now-billion-dollar underwear line Aerie. “He hated it,” says Ramirez. “It was always curious to me why, because he did so well. But he never felt he was able to express his true self.” In 2007, they bought a house on a river in Palmer, Massachusetts — “Well, really, David bought it” says Chavarria — and they frequented the Brimfield flea markets. They became “antique gays,” filling the basement with furniture, clothes, accessories, leather goods, and tchotchkes, and began selling the overflow at St. Anthony’s Market in Soho on the weekends. The preppy-woodsman aesthetic was paradigmatic in the late aughts: Jenna Lyons’s J.Crew, Red Wing boots, buffalo-plaid everything, and those A.P.C. jeans that induced men to endure “selvedge.”

In 2010, the couple opened a brick-and-mortar store called Palmer Trading Company on Sullivan Street in Soho, stocking their vintage haul alongside chambray shirts from Klaxon Howl and custom moccasins from Pelkey. Chavarria wanted to quit his job and work at the shop and design his own clothes. By then he was in his mid-40s, and American Eagle offered him a path of stability and corporate comfort: a promotion, buy-a-house money. “It wasn’t fulfilling for my soul,” says Chavarria. He quit. Initially, the Palmer Trading Company clothing line stuck to the same vernacular of nostalgic Americana. “That was mostly my influence. Because it was selling,” says Ramirez. “But it was very much in that same vein of American Eagle, Ralph Lauren — what he didn’t want to do.”

In 2015, Chavarria started his namesake brand, and the storefront evolved into his studio. There were multiple early iterations: a line called Willy that sold colorful basics and boxers; another, New York Willy, with oxford shirts and boxers. Eventually, he settled on the name Willy Chavarria and designed a small capsule for a Japanese lifestyle company called Baycrew’s: a hunting shirt, topcoat, pleated pants, and pleated shorts. The collection had that signature Chavarria shape — oversize but fitted and made from good, strong wool. They initially tried to sell it in the Palmer Trading Company store, but their regulars wanted the old stuff. “We did get some converts, but it was just a different customer,” says Dustin Hellinger, his brand director until 2023. “But the Japanese went crazy for it,” adds Chavarria.

Soon after launching the brand, the CFDA invited Chavarria to present a collection during the menswear shows in February 2017. He staged a show featuring 13 models behind a chain-link fence — a reference to Ava DuVernay’s documentary about the 13th Amendment, 13th — that they eventually break free from. Putting on shows helped clarify the brand by bringing in a raw, real-world energy. “They were these brilliant concepts that tied in what the collections’ essences were,” says Hellinger. For Chavarria’s spring 2018 line, called “Cruising,” he took over the Eagle, the Chelsea location of the gay leather bar, parking lowriders out front, lending a double meaning to the title of the show. It was the beginning of one of Chavarria’s enduring interests: mixing Chicano culture with queerness. Over the years, one would continue to inform the other, bringing a sense of play to ideas of gender and masculinity: Who gets to be hard or soft? “The whole idea was taking a seedy place most people don’t go to and inviting you in and making it romantic,” says Hellinger. “It still kind of smells like piss and beer, but we light candles and put out florals and flip the concept of who belongs where.”

Central to Chavarria’s universe is what he and his team call “the Willy boys,” a group of models who are collectively his muses and, in most cases, had never modeled before. Street casting has always been an integral part of the DNA; Chavarria would quite literally stop people on the street and ask them if they would walk in his shows. Christiano Wennmann got discovered when a video of him making pizza at Scarr’s went around. Shaid Anaya was working in construction in Dallas when a photographer, Fabian Guerrero, did an impromptu shoot of him modeling some of Chavarria’s clothes. Emmanuel “Chino” Salazar works at a tattoo shop in Greenpoint, drives around the city in a Harley, and performs in an all-Asian hardcore band called Ferment. Most of them are in their 20s and still have day jobs. They are not the white, waifish models who came to dominate the aughts, ushering in the idea that the high-fashion body should be neutral: a blank slate, a hanger. Their lives, like the tattoos on their necks and heads, are visible.

Building the Willy Chavarria brand had the effect of getting his name out there for other jobs. Ye reached out soon after the presentation at the Eagle in 2017 to see if Chavarria would want to collaborate on his brand, Yeezy. Chavarria didn’t have an official title, he says, but he “operated at the highest creative levels alongside Kanye to do everything from develop brand strategies to designing Yeezy Gap.” One of the stranger things Chavarria worked on was the Yeezy Campus that Ye wanted to build on 4,000 acres of land he bought in Wyoming, which Ye told GQ would be “a paradigm shift for humanity.” Chavarria searches his phone to show me a video of a presentation he gave Ye about his vision for the campus. It involved using the campus to employ formerly incarcerated people. There would be various centers: a factory where they would work, housing, a canteen, a garden, a church, and a school. “Let me see if I named it,” Chavarria says. “Oh, I called it the KK Foundation.” I make a noise. “I know, there’s one K missing,” he says, peering over his glasses. “But this is before it went there. It was Kim and Kanye.”

He says Ye still calls him from time to time, but he “keeps it very chill.” “Sometimes I would find myself tearing up or crying when I talked to him, because I could just see he was not well. He’s definitely a tortured soul, and I really just felt for him,” he says. “The last official day I was working with him was the day he went to the White House to talk to the president and he had on that MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN cap. It was just horrible.” Chavarria says this was around the time he began talks with Calvin Klein, where he eventually joined as senior vice-president of design in 2021. “I was like, Okay, fuck this. I’m going to go work for Calvin.” But he seems to have misremembered the order of events. Ye wore the MAGA hat to the White House in 2018, and Chavarria continued to work with him as late as 2021. (Chavarria declined to comment on the timeline discrepancy.)

Chavarria spent three years at Calvin Klein before leaving last year to focus more rigorously on his brand. Ramirez left his job as a VP at Pandora to manage the finances. They brought on an investor, Sarah Stennett, the CEO of FAE Grp, an entertainment company best known for managing musicians like Iggy Azalea and Rita Ora. Before that, Chavarria says, the inventory was “out of control.” “My husband was like, ‘We got to clean this up,’ because there wasn’t a really good strategy to my price points. I was just pricing things based on, like, vibes,” he says. “But no regrets, because I was creating a brand image.”

He brought in more cheeky, boundary-pushing elements too. Last year, he debuted a fascinating anti-commercial experiment, an underwear line called Dirty Willy​Underwear featuring $350 tighty-whities and $375 boxer briefs distressed with tears, urine dribbles, and come stains (not real ones). Dover Street Market sold the line paired with a calendar of beefcakes and a gold cock ring inscribed with BIG WILLY FAN CLUB. ​Another drop at a Barneys pop-up sold the goods alongside an X-rated magazine featuring the merchandise. “That’s Willy’s brain. He has that side of pushing the limits in the queer world,” says Marco Ovando, the photographer for both projects who first walked in one of Chavarria’s shows. “We were like, ‘We’re selling porn at Barneys!’ Sold out immediately.”

A couple of weeks before the Paris show, Chavarria sets up a showroom in a loft warehouse space in Greenpoint, where he had moved the studio in 2021, for editors to preview the collection. The AC is blasting, so he pulls a heavy leather jacket from the rack, cropped with articulated sleeves that give him the look of a muscular roly-poly. He and his publicist, Carolyn Batista, are running through the guest list: who will sit in the front row and who will walk in the show. They were hoping for Bad Bunny, but he’s in the middle of rehearsals for his San Juan residency (his younger brother Bernie Martínez Ocasio made his runway debut in Chavarria’s spring 2024 show). They’d also considered the Argentine director Gaspar Noé, whose provocative films Chavarria is a fan of. “Did Gaspar say if he can walk?” asks Batista.

“He’s gorgeous. But I don’t know if he fits it now,” says Chavarria. (Noé does sit in the front row.) Lately, Chavarria had been reposting citizen journalists keeping tabs on ICE in various neighborhoods on his Instagram Stories: “I need to cast what’s appropriate for the time. Right now, it’s really important to cast people of color, queer people, trans people. It’s the people who are being erased, people who are being disappeared. That’s who I want to see.” He decided to open the show with a statement piece: 35 men, all Black and brown, with shaved heads and mustaches, kneeling on the runway in the same all-white outfit of XXXL tees, basketball shorts, hiked-up socks, and patent-leather shoes — a reference to the prisoners who had been rounded up by U.S. authorities and sent to CECOT, the Salvadoran prison. “I knew I had to say something when everyone’s talking about, ‘Oh, where’s Maria Grazia going to go?’” he says, referring to the former designer of Dior. “Who gives a shit about that stuff? Only people in this bubble of fashion care about it. The customer doesn’t give a shit.”

At the Salle Pleyel in Paris, the response to the show was emotional. Fashion writers called the opening “poignant” and “singularly, powerfully political.” To those watching on social media, the reaction grew mixed. There was the expected right-wing backlash, including from El Salvador president Nayib Bukele, who said his country was “ready to ship” the CECOT detainees to Paris. Criticism also came from the left and within the Latino community. The performance artist rafael esparza called it “exploitative” and “opportunistic marketing.” Fashion writer Mario Abad suggested that the display was performative and said he felt “iffy about a fashion show in Paris being the platform of choice to make a statement.”

Almost everyone I spoke to — current and former employees, the Willy boys, friends of the brand — referred to “the message” and the feeling that the brand, and their work, went beyond fashion. “My label has value, but the value is more so an alignment with what the brand stands for, which is really inclusion, equality, human rights,” says Chavarria. The fuzzy fashion language aside, Chavarria’s strength is in conjuring a feeling that the brand is a larger project of community uplift that people can buy into. “We are a family. We can go and clean the toilets, and we can go and cast people,” says Ovando. “There’s never been a job title. This is what you do.” “It is not even about the money,” says Jess Cuevas, his art director. “It’s more about what it does and how we’re able to see ourselves in this brand and how the younger generation sees this and they think, Oh my God, I’ve never seen anyone that looks this way in this world. That is powerful.”

Chavarria is the happy, self-designated conduit between underrepresented people and mass culture, with an evangelical belief that “the bigger my brand gets, and the more impact I can have, the more fashion will change.” He hires and works with people of color as designers, photographers, artists, models, and production assistants. He has an Obama-era conviction that with enough people at the helm, fashion will become more equitable.

The huarache controversy pierced the veil of identity politics in his work — in other words, the inherent difficulty, or impossibility, of building a brand rooted in “equality” within capitalism. This is only magnified when the producer is a megacorporation, as was the case with his Adidas sandal. The huarache is not only a shoe but a tradition of Indigenous handicraft: The labor is the point. The criticism has landed with the charge of betrayal — detaching the aesthetic from the production goes against the Willy brand’s professed values. If the Adidas shoe, which was reportedly manufactured in China, had been made with the communities it originated from, it might have engendered more trust. On Thursday, Adidas executives visited Villa Hidalgo Yalalag, a town in Oaxaca, to apologize in person.

This isn’t the first time Chavarria has been criticized. In a more blatant instance of plagiarism, Chavarria lifted the illustration from the cover of an issue of Teen Angels, an indie Chicano magazine, and put it on clothes in a collaboration with Pacsun in 2023 for Hispanic Heritage Month. In an Instagram post shortly after the drop, the Teen Angels account wrote, “Here we go again! This time it’s @pacsun and @willychavarrianewyork aka @newyorkwilly using Teen Angel art like it’s their own without any permission. The age old story of big companies using small brands for their own profit. It saddens us to have to post this kind of thing especially when it’s being done by a Latino/Chicano artist.” (Chavarria declined to comment on the Pacsun shirt or to further address the Adidas shoe.)

Chavarria and I are sitting in the pleasant dark of a car with tinted windows heading to Hôtel Salomon de Rothschild. It’s two days after the runway show, and tonight is the issue-release party for A Magazine Curated By, which Chavarria guest-edited. We glide through the city and arrive on time, which is too early. “Can we go in, like, 15 minutes?” he asks. He studies a text message, the kind that starts with “Dear Willy” and has multiple paragraph breaks. I poke my head over and ask what’s going on. “Miss thing, you are funny,” he says as he scrolls up and down. “She has been a hoo-ha. I’m not sure.” He sits in silence, typing and deleting a reply. As far as I can tell, the person on the other end is upset about a lack of attention. In general, he says, he tries to avoid squabbles and energy vampires. “I don’t play like that,” he says. “I can’t get involved in those back-and-forth things.” He types something out. “I just texted, ‘I have no negative feelings about this project at all. I’m sorry it was difficult for you,’” he says.

“I’m gonna take a Percocet. Do you want one?” he asks as he pulls out a prescription bottle. “I’m kidding. It’s an aspirin. I wish I had something like that.”

There’s no end to the schedule. He just finished doing a photo shoot for Dazed, and he’s trying to choose looks to bring to ANDAM tomorrow, for which he’s nominated for the Grand Prize; the winner receives ¤300,000. He has to write his speech tonight. “I want to win so I can pay for the show and keep the lights on. People don’t realize that behind the song and dance is a real business that costs huge amounts of money to operate,” he says. “I’m going to remind them that even a brand like mine, with such high visibility, teeters on the edge of existence.”

Still, he tells me, business has been good. Sales have increased over 150 percent annually. In Paris, he had a number of meetings with wholesale buyers. They went well — so well that there is more demand than capacity. “We can sell only as much as we can afford to make, which is why I need investors that have money,” he says. He’s open to becoming the creative director of a European fashion house. There have been rumors that the Italian luxury house Fendi might be scouting him since Kim Jones left last year.

“Oh, we can’t talk about that,” he says. “At all. I don’t know anything about it.”

“Would you want to do it?” I ask.

“I would looooooove to do it,” he says. “I have been asked by a house that I said ‘no’ to, so it has to be the right house. I need to be at the highest creative levels inside the industry to have the most impact.”

His publicist appears at the window, and we head in. We’re the first to arrive. Model-DJ Yura Nakano spins hypnotic techno as the room fills up. The Willy boys arrive, including Erik “Chachi” Martinez, who bops along to the music with wraparound Oakleys on. “I’ve been a little sad this whole trip,” he says. It’s everything that’s going on with ICE. He sent photos of himself from the show to his mom, and she replied, “My beautiful son.” The money has been helping the family out. “If I have to, I’ll sell my grill,” he laughs. “Willy wouldn’t want me to.” A little shy of the two-hour mark, Chavarria makes his exit. “I have to go write my speech,” he says, squeezing my arm. “Have a good time. Find a glory hole somewhere.”