A Teddy Bear Beat the Paparazzi to It: Inside UGG and Willy Chavarria’s Heatwave-Proof Tease

recall

• A Bear’s Day Out in Paris
• What the Tease Actually Confirmed
• The Reveal: Inside “Comunión”
• The Boots Themselves
• The Heatwave Irony
• Why UGG and Willy Chavarria, Specifically
• What’s Next

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The most accurate face of UGG’s newest collision isn’t Willy Chavarria. It’s a small black teddy bear. Days ahead of Chavarria’s Spring/Summer 2027 menswear show, UGG posted an Instagram reel following the bear on a mini tour through Paris — past the landmarks, a stop for a croissant — before it climbed into a taxi and rode off toward its real destination: Chavarria’s model lounge. No press release, no product shot, no confirmation in writing. Just a bear, a city, and a final stop that told you everything you needed to know.

It’s a teaser format that’s become a small art form of its own during fashion month — light enough to read as a joke, specific enough that nobody mistakes where it’s headed. Brands have leaned on mascot-led teases, countdown reels, and cryptic location drops for seasons now, but there’s something particularly fitting about UGG choosing a stuffed animal as its messenger: cozy, slightly absurd, impossible to take too seriously, and exactly the kind of soft-power image the brand has built its identity around since 1978. By the time the bear reached the lounge, the only real question left was which silhouettes UGG and Chavarria would actually show, and how far the brand was willing to push its own aesthetic into Chavarria’s world.

 

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The pairing makes sense on paper in a way few designer collaborations with a comfort-boot brand do. Chavarria, who founded his menswear label in 2015 after a career path that started at Ralph Lauren in 1999 and ran through stints building out his own menswear retail before he ever showed a runway collection, has spent the past several seasons stacking footwear partners across very different price tiers. There are luxury runway pieces made with Zanotti in Europe; an ongoing Adidas relationship that’s already produced a World Cup capsule and an unreleased Stan Smith line debuting in two colorways; a past collaboration with Zara; and now UGG, covering what the designer has described as a more casual, sports-adjacent register entirely distinct from the rest.

Chavarria has described the structure as deliberate rather than assembled by saying yes to whichever offer landed first: each partner occupies its own lane, with UGG slotted in specifically because of the brand’s long history with his home state. He’s spoken about growing up around California’s surf culture, where UGG boots were a fixture well before they became a fashion-week talking point.

UGG, for its part, has spent the past two years systematically courting fashion credibility beyond its core shearling-boot customer, recently linking with PinkPantheress ahead of her Coachella debut and refreshing its spring 2026 lineup around Elsa Hosk and Rina Sawayama. A Chavarria collaboration — landing the same season he’s CFDA’s two-time reigning Menswear Designer of the Year, in 2023 and 2024 — is the most fashion-forward swing the brand has taken yet, and a clear signal that UGG wants to be read alongside the runway houses rather than adjacent to them.

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The teddy bear’s final stop turned out to be the opening act for Chavarria’s fourth consecutive season showing at Paris Fashion Week Men’s. Friday’s presentation, titled “Comunión” — Spanish for communion, the coming together of people — unfolded inside Espace Niemeyer, the modernist, space-age former headquarters of the French Communist Party. The collection’s framing leaned spiritual rather than secular: a case for togetherness as something sacred, with the show built around the idea that people are stronger gathered than apart.

It was also Chavarria’s first time splitting a runway evenly between menswear and womenswear, a shift he’s framed as a return to first instincts rather than a new direction — womenswear, by his own account, was always his earlier creative preference before a stint at Ralph Lauren and a menswear retail venture pulled him into the category he’s now best known for. The show sent out pencil skirts in pink leather and turquoise silk, pink hot pants paired with shoulder-padded sweatshirts, an A-line skirt and dress made from recycled raffia that read as deliberately shredded, and caped cocktail dresses finished with floral appliqués that carried a glossy, sticker-like sheen up close. Chavarria also debuted new versions of his signature Bronca bag alongside the usual oversized tailoring his label is known for.

Recurring “Willy Boys” models — including a construction worker who walks Chavarria’s shows on breaks from his day job — appeared alongside Romeo Beckham, NBA guard Jordan Clarkson, designer and podcast host Bella Freud, and singer SAINt JHN. The show notably re-cast Beckham, who’d previously walked for the label, and brought in Freud as a friend of the brand rather than a professional model. Chavarria has talked about gender fluidity between his men’s and women’s lines as central to how the brand actually sells in practice, noting that womenswear customers regularly buy from the men’s line and vice versa.

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Five UGG x Willy Chavarria footwear styles exist; only three have actually been shown, with two more held back for a later reveal. The Biker boot — a calf-high, fur-trimmed silhouette built on UGG’s classic shearling construction but reworked with Chavarria’s heavier, more structural proportions — opened the show. The unisex Guard Boot, styled with layered silk boxers and an oversized bomber, followed soon after, photographed on models wearing it as a statement piece rather than a practical layer. And the UGG Hotel Chavarria Slipper, paired with mesh or long shorts and tall white calf socks across multiple looks, rounded out what the designer has called one of his favorite pieces in the drop — built with a sole soft enough for lounging but sturdy enough, in his words, to wear out in the street.

The full collection — footwear plus apparel for both men and women — is set to arrive in September, positioned by both brands as a bridge between traditional American comfort-wear and the kind of structural, politically inflected tailoring Chavarria’s main line is known for. Pricing has not been announced for any of the five styles, and no release-day details have surfaced for the two silhouettes still being held back. Given how methodically Chavarria has staged reveals across his Adidas and Zara partnerships — previewing pieces in stages rather than dropping a full collection at once — a second teaser before September seems likely.

 

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condition

None of this happened in comfortable weather. Paris Fashion Week Men’s SS27 landed during what multiple outlets have described as the city’s hottest stretch since 1947, and the heat became its own running storyline across the week’s coverage. A few days earlier, Louis Vuitton had drawn sharp criticism for installing a massive artificial wave pool at the Cité Internationale Universitaire on the same record-heat day, a decision read by some as tone-deaf water use during a climate emergency the city was visibly experiencing in real time. Chavarria’s own show, by contrast, opened with a guided meditation walking a visibly drained crowd through relaxing their jaws, shoulders, and necks before the actual runway began — a small acknowledgment, intentional or not, that everyone in the room had been cooking for days.

Against that backdrop, sending models out in calf-high, shearling-lined boots reads as either an oversight or a flex, depending on how generously you want to read it. Chavarria addressed the heat directly in interviews around the show, describing how he’d spent much of the prior two weeks working in his underwear in the makeshift Paris studio because of the temperature — a detail that, by his own admission, shaped some of the season’s styling toward shorts and bare-leg tailoring even as the UGG boots stayed fully covered in fur and shearling. Whether that contrast was deliberate styling or simply the reality of locking in a footwear collision months before anyone could check the actual forecast, it’s the detail nearly every outlet covering the show has landed on, and it’s likely to follow the collection right up through its September release — a wool-lined boot launching into early-autumn weather is a far easier sell than one debuting in a heatwave.

why

Strip away the bear and the heatwave, and what’s left is a fairly clean alignment of two brands solving for the same problem from opposite directions. UGG has spent decades and roughly two billion dollars a year in sales proving its boots are comfortable; what it hasn’t fully proven, despite recent pushes with PinkPantheress, Hosk, and Sawayama, is that it belongs on a runway with the same authority as a Celine or a Dior. Chavarria has spent a decade building exactly that kind of authority — Ralph Lauren-trained, CFDA-decorated, known for using runway shows as acts of political and cultural resistance as much as commercial presentations — but his main-line pricing puts him out of reach for most of the audience that actually drives cultural conversation online.

UGG gets a credibility transfusion it can’t manufacture in-house, the same way Adidas and Zara have functioned as Chavarria’s bridge to broader, younger audiences than his runway customer base alone could sustain. Chavarria, in turn, gets a price point and a retail footprint his Zanotti-made luxury shoes simply can’t reach — UGG operates concept and outlet stores in markets from New York to Shanghai, Tokyo to Beijing, with the brand’s own materials citing more than $2 billion in annual sales. It’s the same logic that’s driven nearly every major footwear-meets-fashion pairing of the last decade, executed here through a label whose brand identity, until recently, had almost nothing to do with runway credibility at all. The teddy bear, in that light, wasn’t just a cute teaser device — it was the right register for a brand still figuring out how seriously it wants to be taken, walking the line between fashion-week gravity and the soft, slightly silly comfort-wear identity that built it in the first place.

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Expect the rollout to follow a familiar shape. Official imagery, full pricing, and a confirmed release date will likely surface in the weeks closer to September, alongside the two remaining unseen silhouettes — Chavarria’s Adidas rollout has followed a similar staged pattern, teasing a Stan Smith colorway during one show before confirming wider details later. A second social tease before the September drop seems likely, if UGG’s track record with this kind of pre-launch marketing is any indication.

What’s harder to predict is how the collection reads once it’s actually sitting on shelves in September, divorced from the spectacle of a heat-scorched Paris runway and a bear with better comedic timing than most influencer campaigns. Comfort-wear-meets-runway collaborations tend to live or die on whether the partner brand’s design language survives contact with the host designer’s, rather than simply getting slapped with a co-branded label. Based on what showed in Paris — boots reworked into something closer to motorcycle gear, slippers treated as legitimate streetwear — UGG seems to have let Chavarria actually redesign rather than just rebrand. That’s typically the difference between a collaboration people remember and one that quietly disappears into the outlet stores by spring. The teddy bear, having done its job, will presumably retire — at least until the next collaboration needs a tease that doesn’t require an embargo.