Willy Chavarria at Galeries Lafayette: The Garage That Sold a World.
A 1979 Cadillac, a red-lit workshop and two women at home on a Boulevard Haussmann window show how a department store window can carry a whole story.
Most department store windows tried to show a product. Willy Chavarria’s window on Boulevard Haussmann showed a story. Part of the La Maison des Créateurs series at Galeries Lafayette, “The Garage” turned a pane of glass into a late-night workshop where a 1979 Cadillac Fleetwood sat half-repaired, and visitors who stopped to look were pulled into the world of the Eterno collection before they had noticed a single garment.
The physical installation was built on authenticity. The team sourced a Fleetwood that had been in storage for more than thirty years, with a rusted engine and crumbled foam but a body and interior that were still intact. A specialist workshop in Paris restored the front of the car, and it became the window’s anchor. The walls were hand painted in saturated red, bespoke mannequins were sculpted from mesh with handmade wigs, and Galeries Lafayette’s usual mannequin rules were set aside for the project. Props filled in the rest: socket wrenches on the floor, a mechanic’s tool chest, stacked tyres, trophies, cassettes, a wall-mounted red phone and a single white rose in a paint can. An “ETERNO” plate hung from the bumper, with a pair of legs in satin trousers and polished shoes stretched out from underneath, as though someone had just rolled under to fix something.
Why it worked was the narrative. Visitors were not looking at a display of clothes, they were looking in on the garage of two Chicano women who were at home working on their Cadillac. That gave the window a point of view, a set of characters and a reason to linger. Everything inside it was credible: Vogue lying open next to Musclecar Classics on the tool chest, spray cans and paint tins with the designer’s name printed on them, a Willy-branded oval on every can. Fashion and car culture shared the same surface, which is exactly the tension the collection explores, with precise tailoring, shearling and outerwear in soft mint and pink set against grease and steel.
It also fitted the brand’s long-running storytelling. Chavarria’s work has always been rooted in human stories and Chicano culture, and the window drew its concept from the Paris show for Eterno, where guests sat among a New York street scene and the Cadillac first appeared. The window extended that scene from a single evening into weeks of public space. It also acted as the introduction to BIG WILLY, a new entry-level line of oversized, slouchy workwear designed to invite more people into the Chavarria universe. Workwear in a garage was a natural fit, and a department store window on the busiest boulevard in Paris was the right place to meet a new audience.
The comparison set was useful. Loewe and Jacquemus have both treated windows as miniature theatre, and Diesel has used cars and garages as a visual language for its own irreverence. What distinguished this project was its attention to the life of the objects. The Cadillac and the sourced props were planned to move to a new location after the window run, so the work did not end in a skip. That longer life made the installation feel less like disposable display and more like a travelling set.
The learnings were practical. Build a scene with characters, so passers-by can read a story in a few seconds. Source real objects, because patina and wear cannot be faked. Let the product sit inside the narrative rather than in front of it. Use a constraint, in this case the mannequin rule, as a creative prompt. And plan the afterlife of the installation from the start, because a set that can be reused is a story that can keep travelling. The measures that mattered were dwell time, narrative recall and what visitors did afterwards, whether that was a visit to the collection upstairs, a share or a purchase weeks later.
Concept & Art Direction: Jess Cuevas, Willy Chavarria
Design Development & Production: Motive Productions
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