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One of the first things designers aim for when they achieve a bit of commercial success is to get into underwear. As long as there are M.B.A.s, the Calvin Klein business model will be a subject of study, and it is the rare designer who does not, at some point, figure out that while dressing stars and making glamorous runway clothes are great for one’s image, the margins are in skivvies.
Consider Willy Chavarria. Almost a decade after starting his namesake label in 2015, Mr. Chavarria, a former senior vice president of design at Calvin Klein, became a freshly anointed fashion star in his mid-50s by winning back-to-back men’s wear Designer of the Year awards from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2023 and 2024.
Late last year, he introduced the first line of men’s undergarments for his brand. (Although he is considered a men’s wear designer, Mr. Chavarria, a red-carpet go-to for rule-bending celebrities like Colman Domingo, Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar, terms his clothes unisex.) Being 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 that includes tank tops, boxer briefs and jockstraps (along with sweatshirts, shorts and socks) that were manipulated to look sweat-stained, torn and otherwise distressed.
The collection is meant to both engage and provoke, said Mr. Chavarria, who produced it in collaboration with Latino Fan Club, a pornography studio with a specialized target market and what may be politely called a D.I.Y. aesthetic. Founded in 1985 by Dana Bryan, a photographer who went by the pseudonym Brian Brennan, the studio, now defunct, offered a visual alternative to the glossy, sanitized iconography then dominating gay pornography.
With amateur styling and models almost certainly cast from the streets of New York, Latino Fan Club existed to celebrate raw sexuality at a time when AIDS had largely sent Eros underground. To whatever extent possible via an exploitative medium, it exalted 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 from all the white boy porn we’d been seeing for years,” Mr. Aletti said.
Mr. Chavarria, who called Latino Fan Club “iconic,” described the studio’s disruptive approach to pornography as mirroring the way he thought about his fashion label.
“In our line of work, there’s got to be more meaning behind the pretty pictures,” said the designer, who is making his debut at men’s fashion week in Paris on Friday. “Everything we do has to have some sort of force behind it, to break through the oppressive aspects of the world. Otherwise, why do it?”
For Jess Cuevas, an art director in Los Angeles 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 love the idea that luxury can also be so gritty and gross,” Mr. Cuevas said. And, indeed, the installations Mr. Cuevas designed for the Dover Street Market stores where the collection is sold meticulously replicate the raunchy atmospherics 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 deliberately bringing it to this vulgar place.”
In that sense, Mr. Chavarria’s latest foray into undergarments deviates from the Calvin Klein formula, even as that brand has also toyed with the visual conventions of pornography sites like OnlyFans in its recent underwear ads starring the actor Jeremy Allen White. That is not to suggest Mr. Chavarria’s collaboration with Latino Fan Club lacks commercial appeal, said James Gilchrist, the vice president of Dover Street Market USA and its parent company, Comme des Garçons USA.
“From a wider business perspective, it’s getting harder and harder for creatives like Willy,” he said. “Sure, at the luxury end of the market, there is definitely a lack of creativity, but a big part of what we do is give designers creative freedom.”
If that includes selling expensive underwear that looks as if it has already been worn hard and tossed in the laundry hamper, so much the better.
“We love edgy things,” Mr. Gilchrist said. “It’s who we are.”
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