Willy Chavarria Stages an Ambitious Musical Melodrama

"Twenty-four hours before his Autumn/Winter 2026 show, Willy Chavarria is not backstage but front of house, centre stage, in an expansive, 1,800-seater sports arena on the southern periphery of Paris. It's been blacked out, punctuated with vignettes of props: a brass bedstead with seedy, dust-ruffled satin eiderdown, an American Lowrider, a bus-stop, a Bill and Ted-style telephone booth and a bunch of others. Rather than a catwalk show, with those scenes and a floor demarcated with white lines that recall the arthouse staging of Lars von Trier's Dogville, it looks like a film set."

""It's a one-take movie," Chavarria says, understandably sounding a bit exhausted. "I cannot believe I'm doing it." This season, Chavarria decided to stage a beyond-ambitious, multi-layered musical titled Eterno - an old-fashioned tragic love-story, with heartbreak, bust-ups and a gunfight, a bit West Side Story, a bit MTV (RIP) - all staged and filmed live and projected on a vast screen as the audience watched both perspectives unfold. "I'm a multi-dimensional designer," Chavarria says, before greeting the choreographer Damien Jalet, who has been putting some 90 models and dancers through their paces."

"Alongside those, Chavarria has recruited a variety of Latin musicians to both act and provide the live soundtrack, including Puerto Rican singer Lunay as his male lead, Mahmood as a brooding barkeep, an Adidas-clad gang composed of the boyband Santos Bravos (kind of a Latin American One Direction, to the uninitiated), and Chilean-Mexican singer-songwriter Mon Laferte playing Chavarria's doomed heroine in the musical melodrama that unfolded. "There are several things I've always wanted to do," Chavarria says. Then laughs. "I just kind of combined them into one." And alongside all those things, Chavarria showed no less than three collections -"

Willy Chavarria presented his Autumn/Winter 2026 work in a blacked-out, 1,800-seat sports arena on Paris's southern periphery, transforming the space into a film-like set with vignette props and Dogville-style floor markings. The production functioned as a live, one-take movie titled Eterno, an old-fashioned tragic love story with musical elements, filmed and projected live for the audience to watch multiple perspectives. The piece integrated choreography by Damien Jalet, roughly 90 models and dancers, and recruited Latin musicians and performers including Lunay, Mahmood, Santos Bravos and Mon Laferte. Three separate collections were shown within the layered theatrical presentation.

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