One of the first things designers aim for when they achieve a modicum of commercial success is putting on underwear. As long as there are MBAs, Calvin Klein’s business model will be a subject of study, and it’s a rare designer who doesn’t figure out at some point that dressing stars and creating glamorous runway clothes is great for image, margins are in skivvies.
Take Willy Chavarria. Nearly a decade after starting his eponymous label in 2015, Mr. Chavarria, a former senior vice president of design at Calvin Klein, became a newly anointed fashion star in his mid-50s by winning back-to-back menswear Designer of the Year. awards from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2023 and 2024.
At the end of last year, he introduced the first line of men’s underwear for his brand. (Although considered a menswear designer, Mr. Chavarria, a red-carpet celebrity celebrity such as Colman Domingo, Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar, calls his clothes unisex.) Because he was an inveterate provocateur, he called the line Big Willy.
Not content with that, Mr. Chavarria, 57, tested consumer tolerance this month by releasing a new capsule collection featuring tank tops, boxer shorts and jockstraps (along with sweatshirts, shorts and socks) manipulated to look sweaty and ripped to see. and otherwise sad.
The collection is intended to both captivate and provoke, said Mr. Chavarria, who produced the collection in collaboration with Latino Fan Club, a porn studio with a specialized demographic and what might politely be called a DIY aesthetic. Founded in 1985 by Dana Bryan, a photographer who went by the pseudonym Brian Brennan, the now-defunct studio offered a visual alternative to the glossy, sanitized iconography that then dominated gay pornography.
With an amateurish style and models that almost certainly came from the streets of New York, the Latino Fan Club existed to celebrate raw sexuality at a time when AIDS had sent Eros largely underground. To the extent possible through an exploitative medium, it glorified gay Latinx sexuality, said Vince Aletti, a former photography critic for The New Yorker and The Village Voice who has written about Latino Fan Club.
“It was a relief after all the white boy porn we had been seeing for years,” Mr. Aletti said.
Mr. Chavarria, who called Latino Fan Club “iconic,” described the studio’s disruptive approach to pornography as a reflection of the way he felt about his fashion label.
“In our field, there must be more meaning behind the beautiful pictures,” says the designer, who will make his debut on Friday during men’s fashion week in Paris. “Everything we do must have some kind of power behind it, to break through the oppressive aspects of the world. Why else would you do it?”
For Jess Cuevas, a Los Angeles art director who serves as Mr. Chavarria’s muse and right-hand man, flouting the norms of the luxury goods trade is part of the label’s aesthetic mission.
“I like the idea that luxury can be so gruesome and dirty,” Mr. Cuevas said. And indeed, the installations that Mr. Cuevas designed for the Dover Street Market stores where the collection is sold, meticulously recreating the raunchy atmosphere of the XXX bookstores that inspired them.
“To me, so much luxury is vulgar,” said Mr. Cuevas, who was a creative force behind Madonna’s last tour. “What I love is taking luxury and consciously bringing it to this vulgar place.”
In that sense, Chavarria’s latest foray into underwear is a departure from the Calvin Klein formula, even as that brand has also played with the visual conventions of pornography sites like OnlyFans in its recent underwear ads starring actor Jeremy Allen White. That’s not to say Mr. Chavarria’s partnership with Latino Fan Club doesn’t have commercial appeal, said James Gilchrist, the vice president of Dover Street Market USA and its parent company, Comme des Garçons USA.
“From a broader business perspective, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for creatives like Willy,” he said. “Of course there is definitely a lack of creativity at the luxury end of the market, but a big part of what we do is give designers creative freedom.”
If that includes selling expensive underwear that looks like it’s been worn hard and thrown in the laundry basket, so much the better.
“We like sharp things,” Mr. Gilchrist said. “It’s who we are.”
