Willy Chavarria: dignity, cut extra large
Huron, California has around six thousand residents and sits in the farmland of the Central Valley. Willy Chavarria grew up there, and he has spent the past decade putting that town on runways in New York and Paris without sanding down a single part of it.
The long way in
He did not arrive through a New York fashion school. He studied at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and got into the industry at Joe Boxer, where he started in the shipping department and moved into design after his sketches were noticed. Cycling apparel followed, then Ralph Lauren's RLX line. In 2010 he co-founded Palmer Trading Company in New York. The label under his own name came in 2015.
For most of that run he also held a corporate job, latterly as Senior Vice President of Design at Calvin Klein, a position he kept until 2024 — by which point the house under his own name had become the most discussed thing in American menswear.
The shoulder is the point
Every Willy Chavarria garment starts with proportion. The shoulder is extended and squared off, the body is cut wide and short, the trouser runs full and sits low on the hip. At a glance it reads as oversized. It is more deliberate than that: the volume is drafted rather than scaled up, which is why a tee holds its line instead of hanging off the frame.
The references are Chicano — the zoot suit and its extended shoulder, lowrider culture, Sunday best, the particular dignity of dressing sharply in a place that does not expect it. Workwear runs through it as well. What comes out is tender rather than aggressive, which is unusual for clothes cut this big.
Casting as part of the design
He casts from his own communities, often from outside the professional model circuit, and stages shows as arguments rather than product presentations. The work has been recognised at every level: a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in 2022, the CFDA's American Menswear Designer of the Year in both 2023 and 2024, and a place on the TIME100 in 2025.
He moved the show to Paris in early 2025 for the label's tenth anniversary and has kept it there since; the Fall 2026 collection introduced the first footwear developed in-house. Along the way there have been collaborations with Dickies, K-Swiss, Allen Edmonds and, most visibly, adidas.
Buying it
Take your normal size. This is the sentence people ignore and then regret — the Buffalo tee is meant to sit wide with the shoulder seam dropped, and sizing up turns a designed silhouette into a big shirt.
The tees and long sleeves are the entry point and the pieces the label is best known for. The track sets are the other half of the vocabulary: jacket and trouser are designed together and look best bought that way.
Colour stays dark and saturated — blacks, deep browns, ecru — so it sits easily next to almost everything else on the floor.
At ANSH46
We carry the tees, long sleeves and track pieces, in small numbers per style. Browse Willy Chavarria at ANSH46, or see menswear.