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What Heels Chicano Masculinity?
Sat, November 22, 3:00 to 4:30pm, Puerto Rico Convention Center, 202-B (AV)Abstract
Chicano fashion designer Willy Chavarria recently declared, “I am the new Chicano Ralph Lauren, and my clothes are for everybody.” Chavarria’s Chicano-inspired clothing has garnered him the honor of CFDA Menswear Designer of the Year for two years (2023,2024). In this paper, I engage in a case study of Chavarria’s first shoe design, the “Jalisco,” produced in partnership with the iconic American shoemaker Allen Edmonds. This study focuses on Chavarria’s take on the dressy derby shoe and the choice of modifying the traditional shoe design by adding a 54mm Cuban heel. Chavarria imagines the silhouette as the “new ‘unformal’ shoe that will transcend seasons, occasions and gender boundaries.” Through a close reading of the silhouette of the shoe, the sonics of his recent fashion show, “Tarantula,” and the accompanying ad campaign, I argue that Chavarria’s Chicano-inspired designs fashion new forms of masculinity informed by the “stylized and highly visible refusal” of pachuca/o youth (Habell-Pallan, 345).
Moreover, I argue that Chavarria’s design does more than “transcend gender boundaries.” Instead, his work “heels” masculinity. By invoking the lineage of pachuca/o fashions in these designs and highlighting the excesses of pachuca/o flamboyance, Chavarria’s garments offer a new form of racialized, classed, and gendered Chicana/o style. This opens discussions within Chicana/o style politics as well as new possibilities for Chicana/o subjects to enact a politics of style that is untethered from painful, regressive heteronormative and heteropatriarchal underpinnings of the traditional masculine archetypes within Chicano realist aesthetics. In other words, Chavarria’s heels are designed to keep toxic masculinities at bay and open new worlds where the wearer can explore the vicissitudes of the pleasure(s) within unbounded brown masculinities.