“I think French cuffs are so chic, especially if you're not wearing them without cufflinks, you're just letting them fly in the wind,” says Chava Studio’s Olivia Villanti, her eyes alight as she muses. “Or you have this great cool cuff that, when you roll the sleeve, you can create something really beautiful.” Bring up any shirting detail, be that a French cuff, a spread collar, or a tuxedo bib, and you’ll lose Villanti’s attention for a minute as she ponders their wonders. “I think shirting is the ultimate device for deliberate details,” she summarizes. “There's 50 gazillion ways that you can play with a collar. And there's a million different ways that you can play with a cuff.”
And play, she does. Villanti is the founder of Chava Studio, a Mexico City-based studio that specializes in custom shirting. “I take a lot [of inspiration] from traditional men's tailoring, but it's never taken at face value,” she says though the realms of vintage, women’s, even children’s shirting are by no means off limits. Take, for instance, the brand’s elegant white shirt, which Villanti says is the most direct interpretation of a pre-existing silhouette. It has collar stays, a split-yoke, a cutaway collar, even a tie gap—oh my!— all of which are traditional elements of men’s shirting (and terms I had to google). Men’s shirts are traditionally broader in the chest, but narrower in the hips. In some designs, she flips the dimensions, but here they remain—and always oversized. Villanti picked a silky cotton with just a slight feminine sheen. “And then we really made the collar nice and short. Not too short, but short enough that if you were to pop your collar, you're not going to have too much collar coming up into your face.” Like I said, the attention to detail is evident.
Villanti’s shirting endeavor benefitted from pre-existing infrastructure. Her husband, Guillaume Guevara’s family have been importing fine fabrics to Mexico City from Europe for decades. In more recent years, her uncle expanded the venture to include a made-to-measure shirting studio roughly eight years ago. When the couple relocated to Mexico City in 2019, Villanti began working with them to make shirts for herself—and the spark was lit. She capitalized on the employees and know-how to translate these concepts into fresh designs for women. (Chava is slang for a young woman). She began Chava Studio as a small online business in 2020—but the project called for a more physical element.
The space itself she updated, as well. The studio originally served as a vecindad, a type of tenement housing popularized in Mexico in the 20th century. “It felt very preserved and old school—a time when men had all of their shirts made, which is still a reality in Mexico. There are still a lot of independently run tailors that you could go to, which is a beautiful thing about Mexico.” Architect Diego Villaseñor, a student of legendary architect Luis Barragán, bought the building and renovated it for his first offices some time in the early '80s. (Barragán’s famous residence is just down the street). Guevara’s family bought it in 1990. “You kind of feel like you travel back in time when you come to the studio,” says Villanti.
She began renting her showroom, which had previously served as a storage closet, from her uncle in 2020. “It didn't really have much of an identity or a personality,” she recounts. Old carpet, crumbling ceiling—the works. Refurbishment was due. Six months later, she enlisted architect Diego Solares to help the space to “feel a little more Chava,” she explains. “It was really just about incorporating a lot of natural elements.” They added concrete walls in lieu of the pre existing sheetrock, exposed a brick wall, boarded up the ceiling with plywood—”it feels like you're in this nice little cave.” The floor is now coated in old tilework and the entryway expanded. The walls still reflect the family’s history—a different uncle’s mask collection amassed from traveling throughout Mexico hangs proudly on a blue facade.
Upon its completion in July 2021, the studio was open for appointments—this in-person element is the core of her brand. Now samples hang from old railings. Starched collars perch on a table, seducing prospective customers to discover more of the shirting lore. Measurements litter the chalkboards, or “communal note board,” as Villanti calls them.
Evident in the arrangement, all the shirt-building happens onsite. Villanti employs a team of four and has cultivated a deep relationship with her seamstresses. (They outsource experts for suiting and hair accessories.) “I'm super involved with production,” she explains. “I'm super involved with our grading, with our patterns. Everyday, I'm here at the studio and I'm working with our seamstresses,” she says. “I never really knew that you could have that level of closeness, one, with your production, and two, that you could create products that just felt so unique and special.”
Though she launched Chava in 2020, her love of fashion dates back decades. Villanti worked in New York’s fashion and editorial spheres for decades, with stints at Madewell, Lucky Magazine, and more. The constant churn of product had her disillusioned with the world of fashion. She says she didn’t have “a relationship” with her clothes, at that point, despite their weighty presence in her life and career. Vintage was the only thing that could still light her up. When the pair moved to Mexico City, she had no desire to continue working in fashion.
“I guess it kind of revived me,” she says of the very tangible process of conception, production, and final product. She got the “special”-ness back. “I design for myself in a lot of ways,” she says, sitting before me in a white Chava Studio shirt (Villanti wears a Chava shirt nearly everyday).Everything she does with her personal money, no investors—a sort of blessing in disguise. The made-to-order element is conducive with the lifestyle of the city. “I don't have the demands to create things that I don't love. So if I don't love it, I'm just not going to make it.” That’s also how she justifies the sampling process. If no one buys it, at least it has a home in her closet. “I also feel like it's helped me establish my own personal style in a different way too,” she continues. “It's made me super opinionated about fit and about fabric.”
Now, it would pain her to do anything else. “If you're cynical and feeling a little jaded, there's really nothing like [it],” she says, “seeing ideas come to life or having an amazing dialogue with a client about a shirt that means so much to them.”
"Regardless of big or small, just having a business is really, really hard. And I didn't realize that, obviously. You have to get in it to really understand what it feels like to have this level of responsibility. And if you're somebody that cares deeply about the experience of others, it can be very challenging. I think what keeps me going and so inspired and engaged though, is that I love the design and creativity process of it. It's funny because I would never have written the story of my life and said, 'oh, I'm going to be designing shirts.' But when we start getting samples back, it gives me so much purpose and excitement that I can't imagine not doing it."
"I love connecting with people. I think that one of the things that this has allowed me to do is connect with our seamstresses. My head seamstress—we have a wonderful relationship and it gives me a lot, personally. I love working with her, working with all our seamstresses of course, but she and I work so closely together."
"When I got my shirts made, I was like, 'oh my God, clothing can feel really, really special again. Clothing can feel the way my vintage pieces make me feel. It can feel like something that I want to save and hold onto. And it feels like there's a heritage attached to it.'"
"I feel like I have this dedicated studio space, but I'm also close enough that I can have a dialogue with our seamstresses when needed during the day."
"I did a pretty significant renovation on the space. I wanted a space where I could host people that felt a little more Chava. I worked with an architect here from Mexico, Diego Solares, who has done some beautiful homes in and around Mexico City. It was really just about incorporating a lot of natural elements. We did these concrete walls. We exposed a brick wall. We boarded up the ceiling that was crumbling and just put some plywood over it so it feels like you're in this nice little cave. We found these old tiles for the floor and added a huge entranceway, too."
"The space is a renovated vecindad, which is project housing in Mexico City. An architect called Diego Villaseñor, who was a student of [Luis] Barragán's, this was his office building in the early '80s. My husband's uncle saw the for sale sign outside of this building in 1990 and told his father (my husband's grandfather) about it, and they bought the building. It was the perfect size for them and their business. They did very little in terms of renovating what Diego Villaseñor did, who did a renovation that feels very, very Barragán-y."
"We write all kinds of measurements on [those chalkboards]. It's basically a communal note board. It changes if we're working on a certain design and we're workshopping something we need all of our seamstresses to be aware of. Everybody has a place where they can look to make sure we're on the same page."
"A shirt for me is the ultimate wardrobe staple. A button down is iconic and it will always be iconic. I feel like it's almost blank slate to play around with."
"Men, I feel, have had this stronghold in the world of shirting, just in terms of the options available to them. A lot of made-to-measure shirting tailors or studios give men an option of a color, cuff, and an inner lining. But there's all these details that I just don't feel women have had the opportunity to experience. I thought that was a really beautiful idea."
"My showroom, I will admit, is a very interesting space because it's where I store all my samples, where I ship, and where I store my fabric. It's not just a pristine little space."
"Right now, it's a team of four seamstresses, and they just do the shirts. I also work with two different studios in addition to the one here, but all the shirting happens here on site."
"I work with another studio that is also in Mexico City, who does all of our hair accessories. I always try to find ways to repurpose our fabric waste. That was also another very important piece of my mission when I was developing Chava. Whenever we have extra cuts of the fabric that are too small to make a shirt out of, I work with him to create bows and headbands."
"My husband's grandfather, when this business was his business, employed all four of his children. His oldest, Daniel, worked in the studio. He would travel a lot throughout Mexico and bring stuff back whenever he did. So those masks were a personal collection that he had amassed from all different parts of the country, different family trips. He used that wall as a place to display them."
"I always encourage people to try things on, even if things are not cut to their size. It helps to see people in the clothes. All of our samples are cut differently. Then I will take their measurements, talk about whether there's any adjustments they want to make to that piece. Sometimes someone will want a longer sleeve, a wider neck. It just depends. This is the moment where you are able to customize a little more and you have a reference point because you're working off of a sample. Trying to do this online can be much trickier."
"It's so different in Mexico. You can really do things at a small scale. If anything, it's harder to do the inverse. It's harder to scale up. But you can do things in a small way, and you can have a really close relationship with the people that are making your clothes. I'm super involved with production. I'm super involved with our grading, with our patterns. Every day I'm here at the studio and I'm working with our seamstresses. But I never really knew that you could have that level of closeness, one, with your production, and two, that you could create products that just felt so unique and special. So I think all of that kind of totally changed for me when I started working here."
"Walking into the studio, it was truly revolutionary. It changed my entire attitude towards clothing, towards shopping, and towards dressing myself."
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