![]() “To me, it feels like the way Jane Birkin would do it,” she said. Sizes range from 0-10, but customers also have the option for made-to-measure. Overall, it embodies her desire for a shirt to never look like a “work shirt.” All of her pieces strike a delicate balance between casual and formal, and are versatile in their design, allowing the wearer to customize them however they like. Villanti felt strongly that it should be able to be worn tucked or untucked, without being too oversized, and either buttoned or unbuttoned for a more relaxed effect. It has cocktail cuffs that can be unfolded, plus a wing collar, and a seamless bib with hidden buttons. She started with a tuxedo shirt, ($330), which has since become a Chava staple. “I have very specific opinions about how I want my shirts to fit me and what kind of collars I like, what kind of cuffs I like, etc.” “When I really started playing with samples and trying things out, that's when my mind opened to what I would now call a very, very strong aesthetic,” she said. ![]() She named the brand Chava Studio after the Mexican slang for a young woman-a representation of her desire to take traditional aspects of men’s tailoring and reinterpret them for women. But it wasn’t until spring lockdown that she began developing a full women’s collection, and all these subconscious influences finally coalesced, revealing her own, singular point of view. Over the years, Villianti visited her in-laws’ studio a number of times, rummaging through the extensive fabric archives, and even making a few samples for herself-one inspired by a shirt with detachable cuffs that she found at a Parisian flea market. She was also working at J.Crew as a copywriter during the height of the Ludlow suit. “This is exceptionally beautiful that this exists for men-that you can have such a customized process and the final product feels like such a representation of you.” Around this same time, she became obsessed with menswear icons like Gianni Agnelli, who famously wore his watch over his shirt cuff. “Watching him go through that process, I was like, wow,” she said. Or actually, not thinking about them at all, and that maybe I should start. (What am I, a corporate drone?) But hearing Villanti talk about them so personally and in such detail, I began to wonder if I’d been thinking about them all wrong. Button-downs were too baggy and wrinkle-prone for my taste-not to mention literally buttoned-up. I preferred the snug ease of a T-shirt or a turtleneck. Olivia Villanti, the founder of Chava Studio, a made-to-order clothing brand founded in 2020, was explaining her love of an elegant, Italian “spread” collar, (compared to, say, a “cutaway” or a “wing tip”), how she likes a little bit of firmness in the inner-lining so she can properly pop it, and buttons here, not there, and I thought to myself: Who knew there were so many different ways to make a button-down shirt?Īdmittedly, I’d never been a big fan of the style. I can tell you the exact moment my mind changed: It was a Friday afternoon in March and I was standing in a sun-filled room in Mexico City staring at nine different styles of shirt collars.
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