Twenty-four hours before his Autumn/Winter 2026 show, Willy Chavarria is not backstage but front of house, centre stage, in an expansive, 1,800-seater sports arena on the southern periphery of Paris. It’s been blacked out, punctuated with vignettes of props: a brass bedstead with seedy, dust-ruffled satin eiderdown, an American Lowrider, a bus-stop, a Bill and Ted-style telephone booth and a bunch of others. Rather than a catwalk show, with those scenes and a floor demarcated with white lines that recall the arthouse staging of Lars von Trier’s Dogville, it looks like a film set. Which is the point, because that’s what it is. “It’s a one-take movie,” Chavarria says, understandably sounding a bit exhausted. “I cannot believe I’m doing it.”
Neither can I. This season, Chavarria decided to stage a beyond-ambitious, multi-layered musical titled Eterno – an old-fashioned tragic love-story, with heartbreak, bust-ups and a gunfight, a bit West Side Story, a bit MTV (RIP) – all staged and filmed live and projected on a vast screen as the audience watched both perspectives unfold. “I’m a multi-dimensional designer,” Chavarria says, before greeting the choreographer Damien Jalet, who has been putting some 90 models and dancers through their paces. Alongside those, Chavarria has recruited a variety of Latin musicians to both act and provide the live soundtrack, including Puerto Rican singer Lunay as his male lead, Mahmood as a brooding barkeep, an Adidas-clad gang composed of the boyband Santos Bravos (kind of a Latin American One Direction, to the uninitiated), and Chilean-Mexican singer-songwriter Mon Laferte playing Chavarria’s doomed heroine in the musical melodrama that unfolded. “There are several things I’ve always wanted to do,” Chavarria says. Then laughs. “I just kind of combined them into one.”
And alongside all those things, Chavarria showed no less than three collections – his mainline, a new democratically-priced online-retailed range he’s calling Big Willy (he knows what he’s doing), and that Adidas tie-in, with clothes connected with the official Mexican soccer kit as one of the host countries of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. Santos Bravos danced through the fake streets in those; the Chicano rappers Foos Gone Wild cycled out on lowrider bikes to showcase Big Willy. “I wanted to do something special; something that featured the clothes in more of a realistic movement,” Chavarria said. “With some drama. So you could see the natural state of the clothes. But [with] this collection, I knew I wanted to show them as cinematically as possible.”
Back in rehearsals, Chavarria is talking direction. “There’s a scene where she drops her bag,” Chavarria says. “We need to make sure we get the bag in shot.” He’s expanding his accessories line; the opening of the show has amped-up footsteps, to cannily draw attention to his women’s footwear debut. A day later, in action, your head was swivelling from a blonde bombshell Mon Laferte writhing in a scarlet satin dress on that bed, to an oiled-up, bare-chested Lunay pumping iron, then the all-singing, all-dancing rest.
“There’s so much romance and emotion in fashion that’s getting lost” – Willy Chavarria
That is all well and good, but what about the clothes? Well, they were great. Great enough to actually pull your attention away from all that action and focus on the models circuiting the space, dressed in Chavarria’s sharp tailoring, reconstituted uniforms, figure-hugging pencil skirts. It takes a soaring level of confidence to be able to pull off a show like this and not worry that everyone’s attention is going to be totally distracted; it takes more talent to ensure there’s no chance of it happening. It also convinced you, in a rare way, that you want to look like this, in swagger-shouldered tailoring, perfected leather bombers, high-rise plaid shirts with collars popped. It even convinced you that ribbed white socks with loafers are viable footwear for everything from an evening tuxedo to a tracksuit, a stylistic decision made at your own risk, if you’re not Mahmood. But it also demonstrated how the clothes could grab your attention and focus your eye on one tiny, perfect detail, even amidst the gloriously choreographed chaos of this ambitious production. A cut of the movie we saw made will premiere online, too.
Chavarria has crafted a world, but it’s small fry next to the giants he orbits in Paris – a terribly chic little Pluto, next to the Jupiters of Dior and Chanel. Does that necessitate this kind of scale, to compete? “I don’t think Paris demands a show of this scale – but I wanted to do a show of this scale because I’m so incredibly bored,” Chavarria said, honestly, brutally. He’s been in days of rehearsals, so forgive the bluntness. “There’s so much romance and emotion in fashion that’s getting lost.” Seems like we’ve found it again.
