All Of The Biggest Talking Points From NYFW So Far
Arriving to Wall Street for Willy Chavarria’s New York Fashion Week season opener for the SS25 collections on Friday evening felt like the type of fan scene you typically only see in Paris. New Yorkers are famously blasé about spotting celebrities. We pride ourselves on living in the kind of city where we can go to the grocery store unbothered. But across from the American flag-draped New York Stock Exchange, on the steps of a grand neo-classical office building that once housed J.P. Morgan, were throngs of kids wielding iPhones at designer Willy Chavarria's HQ for the night.
They may have been there for Lourdes Leon, Ozuna, or Ciara. Rihanna was in town, although she was more than a hundred blocks north at the Guggenheim for Alaïa. But mostly it seemed like everyone wanted to soak up the good vibes that are Chavarria’s stock in trade.
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Chavarria is redefining how representation, community and politics can be expressed through fashion. Perhaps never more so than at his SS25 show, titled 'América', which brought the aesthetics of Huron, California — the Mexican American agricultural community where he was raised — to the literal halls of power and featured copies of the United States Constitution as swag.
'América is the pronunciation for America through the voices of immigrants,' Chavarria explained backstage. 'I just thought that was a beautiful way to tell the story of the people in this country who work to feed us and really remind us that we all have a right to be here and we can make change by voting.'
The show opened with a rousing rendition of Mexican musical legend Juan Gabriel’s love ballad 'Querida' by the Latin Grammy-nominated trio Yahritza y Su Esencia from Washington state, and featured traditional four-pocket linen guayabera shirts paired with Chavarria’s signature super-long basketball shorts (also in linen), United Farm Workers logo tees, straw ranchero hats, and printed face bandanas.
The lineup also featured Adidas track jackets – ruffled Mexican blouse and Jabbar trainer – pointy Mexican boot hybrids, as well as a preview of Chavarria’s upcoming merch drop for the free speech organisation the American Civil Liberties Union, with whom he’ll host a panel on civic engagement later in the week.
With the presidential debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump scheduled for Tuesday (September 10), the penultimate day of NYFW, politics were never terribly far from the runway. Nepalese American designer Prabal Gurung’s live string orchestration featured a vibe shift from 'Flower Duet' (from the Léo Delibes opera Lakmé) to a Holi mashup, as models came out for the finale walk in suffragette white looks tossing pink powder, a tribute to Harris’ and his own South Asian heritage. He then took a victory lap in a T-shirt that read VOTE on the front and Harris/Waltz on the back.
At Laura Kim and Fernando Garcia’s Monse show — the label now indelibly associated with Michelle Obama’s criss-cross lapel waistcoat that went viral at the Democratic National Convention — Tiffany Hadish crashed the runway in a Brat green suit, an early contender for the colour of the season. And Tanner Fletcher’s whimsical presentation of female archetypes included a Cat Lady wearing a cropped bib blouse and lace trimmed denim shorts who was walking a feline garden statue on a black satin ribbon leash.
Even on the runways of European designers, American ideals of freedom and liberty held sway. Tunisan-born French designer Azzedine Alaïa was an avid collector of American fashion. The recent exhibition Azzedine Alaïa, couturier and collector at the Paris museum Palais Galleria featured more Charles James and Claire McCardell than exists in the collections of most US institutions. It turns out that Alaïa’s current creative director Pieter Mulier is also an aficionado.
His clothes, built for movement and engineered without zips or buttons, took cues from American sportswear greats, from the Jamesian sculpted puffer jackets to Pauline Trigère-like double-face hooded swing coats and jersey bandeaus and pleated parachute pants that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Halstonettes at Studio 54.
At Budapest-based label Nanushka’s 20th anniversary show, designer Sandra Sándor talked about how New York has often felt like a second home for her label. She held her first-ever presentation here back in 2018, and had felt a limitless sense of possibility. Sándor is a designer for whom sustainability is more than a buzzword, and this season she explored innovative uses for deadstock materials, cutting apart older knitted fabrics and hand-knitting them into new textures.
And, at Tommy Hilfiger’s 40th anniversary extravaganza on Sunday evening, Captain Tommy continued his grand tour of nautical New York City landmarks, which last featured the Grand Central Oyster Bar. For SS25, we boarded the MV John F. Kennedy, a decommissioned Staten Island Ferry belonging to Pete Davidson and Colin Jost.
The golden hour parade featured a remix of Hilfiger’s greatest hits like captain’s blazers and belted trench coats with crisp checked poplin shirting in interesting proportions from tunic-length tops to maxi dresses, neck tie bandanas, TH monogram raffia baseball caps — and a side of New York pretzels and mini hot dogs.
On board, the guests went wild for the evening’s surprise musical performance, Wu-Tang Clan. On shore, the fans were back, this time screaming for the K-Pop and T-Wave stars watching the show. Within a few hours a TikTok of Korean musicians Felix and Lee Know of Stray Kids meeting Thai actors Pond, Phuwin, Fourth, and Gemini on a boat in New York Harbor with the Brooklyn Bridge soaring skywards in the background had racked up tens of thousands of likes on TikTok. And what, really, is more American than that?
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