“It’s Willy does Lilly,” jokes Willy Chavarria, referring to Queen of Prep Lilly Pulitzer, when I dropped by his Brooklyn studio a couple of weeks ago for a preview of his first full womenswear collection that walked the runway today in Paris. The CFDA American Menswear Designer of the Year winner for two consecutive years now, counts Billie Eilish, Tracee Ellis Ross, and Dua Lipa among the many female fans of his signature oversized tailoring, rooted in Chicano culture. But he’s sure to win new acolytes with the hourglass blazers, pencil skirt sets, trench dresses, and voluminous gowns in sunny hues that accounted for fifty percent of his spring 2026 lineup, an unexpected departure from the more androgynous silhouettes and darkly romantic palette for which he’s best known.
Chavarria has a knack for bricolaging references. He has just finished binge-watching Sirens and says he’s “obsessed” with all of the bright, colorful chaos on display on the fictional New England island of Port Haven, also mentioning the larger-than-life prints worn by Palm Royale’s Palm Beach society interloper heroine played by Kristen Wiig as a point of inspiration. “I wanted to create a subversive take on preppy style,” he says. “The colors are all a little off, but when you put them together, they’re jarring in a way that’s unexpected and really beautiful, and it gives the person wearing them a sense of power.”
Chavarria’s hues are quite specific. His Butter is “too pale” and his Red Hot reads more theatrical than Nantucket. His Uniform Green borrows from the distinctive verdant carpeting of the Oscar Niemeyer-designed French Communist Party Headquarters, while his Bourdin Blue has the supersaturated tone of one of Guy Bourdin’s swimming pool photos. (The models wore reissued 1970s pumps and sandals from the historic French shoe brand Charles Jourdan immortalized in Bourdin’s edgy advertising images.)
Chavarria sees this season’s exploration of bold color as a natural extension of his big jackets. The collection is titled Huron, the name of the predominantly Mexican American farming community in California’s San Joaquin Valley where he grew up and which has been a site of ICE raids. As ever for a designer who didn’t summer in moneyed seaside enclaves, personal style is political. “I’m really not a fan of the whole quiet luxury trend because it just makes a lot of us disappear,” Chavarria says. “That’s not what we need right now when we’re seeing the erasure of people and cultures and identities and history. I think now more than ever, we need to show up as our strongest selves.” To drive that point home even further, the show began with a moment of profound reflection as 35 men took to the runway in white shorts and t-shirts in tribute to the immigrants who have been unlawfully detained, deported, and imprisoned. (The shirts were made in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union.)
Chavarria learned early on that fashion can be a powerful tool for self-expression and believes that dressing unapologetically is a way of questioning who gets to access elite spaces, redefining totems of status, and undercutting entrenched social hierarchies. Though he has mostly worked in menswear until now, both at his own label and past design jobs at Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, Chavarria says strong women were his original muses. “When I was very young, like four years old, I asked my mom to buy me an address book because I thought it was a dress book,” he recalls. “I was just fascinated by the women in my life, my mother and my aunts, and I filled the pages with pictures of women in dresses.”
Over the past few seasons, Chavarria has obliged women’s buyers who ask him to cut his tailoring looks in women’s sizes and he introduced a pencil skirt-focused women’s wear capsule on his Fall 2025 runway that will soon be available at Bergdorf Goodman. He waited to create the sort of glamorous silk crepe and cloqué eveningwear that feels like the fullest expression of his childhood sketches until his label had grown to the point where could hire a head of design. “It didn’t seem right to do women’s wear from a purely gay male perspective because there’s been enough of that,” he says of his decision to hire accessories hitmaker Rebeca Mendoza. “We work really closely to make sure that we’re designing for how women want to be seen rather than for how men want to see them.”
As creative director of Mark Cross, Mendoza helped give the Boston Brahmin label new cultural relevance by reimagining ladylike box bags with surreal accents such as jumbo freshwater pearls and grommets. She’s achieved similar alchemy here with a W stitched handbag offering in luxe materials such as smooth grain calf and shiny eel leather that features oversized clutches, a bowling bag, and a weekender Chavarria describes as “almost like a large Kelly.” Each is finished with a set of jangling keys that reference his working-class upbringing. “I gotta go to work and open the door, this is the key to my house, this is to my storage, this is to my neighbor’s apartment, and this is to my mailbox,” he says, touching each lovingly.
