Willy Chavarria Is Messing With Americana

In 1978, when the fashion designer Willy Chavarria was 10 years old, he and his family attended a production of Zoot Suit, a play by Luis Valdez. The work drew from the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon Murder, when the death of a partygoer became the pretext for a wider criminalization of Chicano youth in Los Angeles. Hundreds were brought in for processing and 22 indicted. On trial was the pachuco, young Chicanos who spoke caló, a patois of Spanish and English, and whose style held the posture of dissent: zoot suits with high and tight waists, pleated legs, and long jackets; swinging chains; and hair slicked back into pompadours with a feathered Borsalino. The look was big and swaggy, and lawmakers considered the liberal use of fabric unpatriotic during wartime. In the play, the pachuco is a trickste