Our Patron Saint of the Misfits
Save us Willy Chavarria
Hang around me or my Substack long enough and you’ll notice my academic crush on social theorist Mina T. Pham. One of my students’ favorite readings is this one, where Pham re-frames the vitriol against fast fashion as a racist and classist narrative. She asks why we blame consumers for the horrors of fast fashion, and why we think shopping ‘slow fashion’ will save both the garment workers and the planet when, simply put, overproduction is the problem. The article is such an “ah ha” moment for my students, I love to see it.
The whiteness of a flattering fit
In her 2015 article, “Visualizing the Misfit,” Pham uses the term “misfit” to play on the idea of a garment fitting in a so-called unflattering way, as well as referring to those on the margins of society. Part of the article focuses on the development of body scanning technology to help consumers find the “perfect fitting” garment. This technology never really took off but the idea behind its development was the utopian belief that technology can solve any problem, even the mis-fitting garment problem. And, underneath the belief that misfitting garments are in fact a problem is the racist logic that a perfect fit is one in which the consumer’s body will be made to look as thin, well proportioned, and as elongated as possible. The garment will “flatter” the wearer, in other words. The ‘flattering fit’ stands as code for ‘thin.’ Of course, in the fashion world, the thinness that prevails is racialized, too. White, Eurocentric features are the ideal. All to say, body scanning technology was deployed to help consumers better approximate Western ideals of beauty, i.e. whiteness.
The mis-fitting garment is excessively oversized, baggy, or loose, but it can also be a fit that is too tight, revealing, skimpy. An item of clothing that is too much or too little is considered a misfit, a fashion faux pas. We can look across our culture and history to see how the dominant groups use misfitting clothing to police boundaries of in-group and out-group, deviant or upstanding citizen. Baggy pants, visible underwear, short skirts are often at the top of banned garments in school dress codes, for example.
While the mis fit is about clothing, it’s often about who wears what. Hailey Bieber wears her hair slicked back and it’s “clean girl” but when a Latina woman does the same it’s marked as other. Pham describes the misfit, “The bad fit has been a salient aspect of the visualization of otherness. As a visual cue, it indicates a mis-fit of the individual to the social norms, practices, and values that clothing signifies” (2015, p. 169).
Rebellious Misfits
Misfitting clothes offers a way to challenge dominant culture, and celebrate different perspectives. 90s Hip Hop artists wore baggy pants, which was considered deviant, unflattering, and misfitting by white norms. Dapper Dan famously took luxury logos to the extreme in his collections. The good fit is always contested, especially at the margins. Willy Chavarria is the latest fashion designer to challenge the fashion industry’s conception of misfits, both social and sartorial.
Chavarria’s latest SP/S 25 collection centers essential workers, farm workers, immigrants, and California Chicano culture for fashion audiences. His clothing is dramatically oversized (and sometimes dramatically skimpy), fluid, sexy and perfectly tailored. It’s gorgeous and his recent collection stopped pretty much the entire internet in its tracks. His uses a diverse mix of real people, athletes, and models to show his collections. My crush on Willy solidified when I heard him say a crooked eye, and other such deviations from the ideal, are what make people sexy and beautiful. Every time I notice one of my eyelids drooping, I think of this.
He recently won the CFDA menswear fashion designer of the year, again. Why is the fashion industry celebrating a designer who is pushing so hard against the normative, Eurocentric idea of flattery, centering identities on the margins of the fashion industry? Chavarria is reinterpreting, and reframing the aesthetic of a cultural misfit. Interestingly, the Western fashion industry is here for it and open to this realignment of fitting right and fitting in.
Taste, aftertaste and race
Pham, once again, can help us make this make sense. In her book, Asians Wear Clothes on the Internet (2015), she explains that the fashion industry (the Western, luxury and lux adjacent) develops certain “racialized tastes” for otherness. Her book considers the rise of the Asian super bloggers of the early aughts but we can extend her argument to Chavarria too. The Western fashion industry develops racialized tastes for something outside of Western norms to expand market shares and to bolster the industry’s identity as a progressive force in the world (versus one of its biggest polluters). The “taste” for Asian super bloggers emerged as the markets crashed in the West (2008), as digital technology spread, and as Obama ascended. Fashion wanted to join in fun of claiming America was finally ‘post race.’ The fashion industry also wanted to show itself as an industry not driven by nepotism, which it did by echoing the tech industry’s narrative that digital media was democratically rewarding creative work. Embracing Asian super bloggers allowed the industry to check all of these boxes at once.
The taste for Asian super bloggers, and the aesthetic difference they brought, did not last. A few years later the editors of the big fashion magazines were referring to the Asian super bloggers as “cheap” and “deceitful”, thinly veiled racist insults. Pham refers to the turn away from these bloggers as a “racial aftertaste”. A racial aftertaste is one in which differences that were once celebrated now become “too much.”
I can’t help but wonder why Chavarria is hitting the proverbial spot so hard right now. Granted, his clothing, the models, everything about what he’s doing is SO beautiful, it’s hard to look away. My eyes have not lingered like this on images since the pre-internet days of magazines. Does his ascendance tell us anything about the larger cultural shifts we’re experiencing? His focus on essential workers and the beauty of the Chicano immigrant community is a reaction to the pandemic and the nationalist, racist, xenophobic politics of the right. The reception of his collection and its political message might be signaling a ‘taste’ for social justice, worker movements, and for our history as a nation of immigrants. He describes his POV:
Chavarria is offering up another version of American and especially masculinity that counters the ugliness of the right. By elevating working people and their style, he counters trends such as quiet luxury. His clothing and the models wearing them signal the workers at a country club, not the members. The white nationalists just look, aesthetically, so ugly in comparison: they are the ones with misfitting clothing (think of Trump’s weird fitting suits, Vance’s weird eyeliner).
I also think Chavarria’s rise, in all its Eurocentric bucking glory, is so profound because his collection offers a break from overly data driven analysis of consumer behavior. He is not designing for some ill-defined market or consumer. He is not trying to create growth at all costs. He’s not playing it safe! The pants are huge, the shoulder pads are extreme. Chavarria is so refreshing because he’s doing what we want fashion designers and artists to do: design from a perspective, a position. He’s reflecting on his life and letting it inform his work. Why is this now such an anomaly? Perhaps
is right, fashion, style, risk have all been excel-sheeted to death. He gets this too:I could gush for days about my visceral reaction to the beauty of his collection. I know I’m not alone. Yet I’m haunted by Pham’s thesis of racial aftertaste. She finds that one of the reasons the Asian bloggers had such a wide reception and reach is because they wrote in English and they were white adjacent. Chavarria knows what he’s doing here, and I hope he will forever be commenting on the inequalities inherent to Western society. We shall see if the fashion industry reasserts its Eurocentric norms. It probably will.
Misreading the tea leaves from my blue, fashion bubble
NGL, Chavarria gave me hope about the upcoming election. When I look back at who and what was blowing up pre-2016 it was prairie core and Batsheva. Was that the tell that Trump would win, that we were entering a moment of Nationalism and conservatism? Hindsight is 20/20. I’ve seen lots of tiktoks about how the fashion signs have been there all along regarding the 2024 election. I was hoping the taste for Chavarria signaled a culture ready to expand our idea of America, Americans, and the good fit.
Now that we’re seeing where the votes fell, I wonder if the fashion industry’s embrace of Chavarria signals whiteness opening its door just a crack for a ‘taste’ of Latino culture. Much has been made about the rightward swing of Latino men (I think we should all wait for the final numbers to come in). The fashion industry, in all its white Eurocentrism, is letting a bit of difference, a beautifully dressed ‘misfit,’ in. If history is a guide, they’ll soon be slamming the door on such difference. Chavarria gives me hope, however. His success comes, in part, because he is commenting on white supremacy in fashion and society. His success tells me there’s a lot of us here for this commentary.
If anything, he’s looking more like our patron saint of the misfit.
love this! i do caution against wholeheartedly attributing misfitness to latinidad-which as an identity is formed in direct rejection/assimilation/theft/contrast to indigenous and a black culture in latin america/diaspora.
Such an interesting read after last night attending the opening of Arleene Correa Valencia work and hearing her speak at the UMFA (Utah Museum of Fine Arts), especially about how farm workers are invisible and using pieces of their clothing in her art. Powerful work, powerful words.