I Went to Mexico City to Find the Perfect Button-Down
I want to be the person who packs the weekend before a trip but instead I am the person who packs the day of the trip, at 1:30 in the morning. This is stressful and not recommended and I do it every time.
The problem is, I think of every trip as an opportunity to try on a new personality. The clothing I pack has to be not just what I want to wear, but also who I want to become. In theory, it’s romantic. But in reality, it’s also just about the easiest way to set yourself up for an existential crisis in your underwear, standing among all of your belongings in piles on the floor, wondering: Who even am I? I’ve heard there are people with cubed packing blocks and to-do lists who don’t face this mental anguish, but I am unfortunately not one of them.
This past March, when I was heading to Mexico City, I finished packing at 3 in the morning. I'd gone through my entire wardrobe in hopes of finding colors so bright, they could rival the pink walls of Luis Barragán’s famous homes. I searched for skirts that were sheet enough to keep me cool in the heat without making me look like I was on a beach vacation. I had been to Mexico City once before, well enough to understand the vibrancy of the city, and I laid on my bed scrolling through old photos from that trip, trying to absorb its energy, in between folding tops into my suitcase. Before I zipped it shut, I sprinkled a handful of scrunchies like crushed flowers on top.
I did not pack a single button-down. And yet button-downs would become the focus of my entire trip.
Designer Olivia Villanti's brand, Chava Studio, specializes in sleek made-to-order tailoring for women. It's based in a peach-painted building with bright blue doors just one block up from Casa Luis Barragán, the former residence of the famed architect and one of Mexico City’s most popular sites. As I walk in, she grabs a button-down off a rack: her peplum shirt, one of the brand’s signature styles, made from the Swiss cotton of tuxedo bibs with a removable Peter Pan collar and shift cuffs. The fabric at the shoulder gathers to create a slight puff, with small pleats nipping at the waist for a peplum that feels Victorian rather than millennial.
“This is my favorite shirt in the whole world,” Villanti exclaims. She brings it to her chest and gives it a tender embrace.
Villanti started Chava Studio shortly after a 2019 move from Greenpoint, Brooklyn to Mexico City, which is where her husband Guillaume Guevara is from. Guevara’s grandfather, Edouard Gilly, immigrated there from France and started Gilly e Hijos, a fabric importer for some of Europe’s top textile mills. Guevara’s uncle, Bruno, tried to revive the business by selling bespoke men’s shirting.
A fashion writer and consultant who had formerly worked for J.Crew, Villanti spent years visiting the studio. After a trip to Paris, she was inspired by a vintage peplum top, which she stumbled upon in a market and thinks may have been designed for a child. “It was such a beautiful little shirt,” she tells me. She describes what happened after as “fortuitous.” Having left her job and moved to a new city, she wasn’t sure what her style was, or how she would reconnect to the joy clothing once brought her. And then there was this little shirt that she decided to try and recreate from her own point of view, surrounded by the bright walls of a decades-old fabric studio sitting in Luis Barragán’s periphery. It would become the Chava Studio peplum shirt that she would build her brand around.
The space itself made her feel like she had entered another time. It gave her the sense that she could create something small and special in a time where everyone wants to scale up and expand, where so much of the clothing we see feels like something we’ve already seen.
“I love the shirt,” she tells me. “Because you can be creative with it and do a lot of different things with it. But it’s also a very democratic item of clothing. It really spans generations, and ages. That’s the beauty of a shirt, right?”
With Chava Studio, Villanti wanted to create something centered around the fine craftsmanship of traditional suiting that didn’t feel precious. “It should be the shirt in your closet that you always reach for, not the one you relegate to only wear on a special occasion.”
Back in her studio, she is gushing. She is grabbing at the collars on display, explaining the difference between the Italian “spread collar” and those known as a “cutaway” or a “wing tip.” She is pulling at large rolls of fabric, saying things like, “This has a hint of mohair in it” and squealing at the touch of another, “This one is exquisite—I can’t.” Guevara’s grandfather built his business with fabrics imported from Saville Row, and Villanti strives to preserve that kind of craftsmanship while making something “for the girls.”
“There’s something emotional about going to an atelier and having something made just for you,” she tells me. And yet it is still something we mostly associate with men, and with Europe. As Villanti points out, “Mexican culture is steeped in craftsmanship, but then there's this stigma attached to that. ‘It's not France and Italy!’ That whole narrative needs to change because this brand requires the same generational skill that those countries have built their reputations on.”
When she introduces me to her lead seamstress, Yolanda Ramirez, she practically gets down onto her knees to bow. “Yolanda is…everything,” she says before a slight tear wells in her eye. Ramirez smiles at me before taking my measurements for a custom top and points out the scalloped sleeve of my blouse, calling it sweet in Spanish and telling Villanti to note it for later.
Since 2020, Chava Studio has grown from making a couple of signature shirts to a handful. There’s a funnel-neck reversible shirt with long French-style cuffs that can be worn two ways, with the collar open or folded. There's the tuxedo shirtdress dotted in mother-of-pearl buttons that looks plucked out of a rom-com wardrobe, like the oversized shirt a protagonist would borrow from her boyfriend and look better in. And there's the cap sleeve t-shirt in blush, the top Villanti was wearing at the studio, with a wide relaxed neckline that exposes just a hint of collarbone, creating the perfect crinkle when tucked into a pant.
She has since collaborated with Madewell, where she has previously worked, for a small, limited collection of striped menswear-inspired sets of button-downs and boxer shorts that sold out instantly. And her summer collection came out this week, with a summer shirt in silk cotton gingham meant to be worn mostly unbuttoned and a linen zip pant in a shade of turquoise that matches the walls of the studio.
The weekend after visiting the studio, I keep running into Villanti's friends as we are walking around the city, all wearing Chava Studio. They were at coffee shops and art galleries, pressing the sleeves and buttons of their Chava with affection as they spoke with their hands. Villanti prides herself on the community she has built of creative women all bonded by their love of her clothing. When I tell her about these chance encounters, weeks later over the phone, I can hear her smile as she says, “I guess it’s become a bit of a uniform.”
My made-to-order top, the peplum top Villanti loves like her firstborn child, arrived at my doorstep earlier this summer. I would have never thought to pack a shirt like that for my trip months ago, but now I throw it on when I want to feel the energy of Mexico City on my skin.
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