There is a version of this collaboration that would have been easy and forgettable. Put a designer's name on a Classic Short, dye it black, call it a moment. UGG has done more than twenty-five collaborations since formally launching the program in 2017, and the category has a well-worn floor. This is not that. The UGG x Willy Chavarria capsule, announced this week and arriving September 10, is a genuine reworking. Full-grain leather, chrome hardware, a shin guard, all of it sitting on top of the sheepskin lining that makes a UGG a UGG. It is a biker boot that wants to be held.
The partnership did not arrive through a press release. It arrived on a runway. On June 26, during Spring/Summer 2027 Paris Fashion Week, UGG turned up unannounced at Chavarria's show. Three unisex styles walked. The Guard Boot, styled with layered silk boxers and an oversized bomber. The Biker, worn with bright button-downs and long shorts. The Hotel Chavarria Slipper, paired with mesh shorts and tall white calf socks. Romeo Beckham walked in the Biker. SAINT-JHN, Sebastián Yatra and Steven Martinez were in the room wearing the collaboration. Strength versus softness, as the brand put it. Chavarria's own framing, from that release: "This is my love letter to the outlaw in you." It is a good line, and it is also a fairly precise design brief.
The collection runs to five footwear styles, all unisex, all built from full-grain leather and lined with UGG's sheepskin. The Guard Boot is the anchor, with a molded toe cap, molded heel, pull-on handles and a protective shin guard. It is the most utilitarian object UGG has put its name to in years, and the one Danny Trejo wears in the campaign. The Biker and the Relaxed are both reinterpretations of UGG's 1999 Birch Collection, rendered in slouched black leather with custom Chavarria chrome hardware. That archival move is the easiest thing to miss here. Chavarria did not invent a slouch boot for UGG. He went into the archive and found one. The Otzo Clog gets supple leather, a premium wool jersey lining, and bespoke hardware, the house shoe that leaves the house. The Hotel Chavarria Slipper carries a leather upper with the designer's crest embroidered across the forefoot. Two pieces round it out: the Hug It Tee, 100% cotton with a "Let's UGG It Out" graphic, and a sock finished with an embroidered Chavarria insignia.
The campaign is the part that will travel. Titled UGG and Kisses, it casts Eva Longoria, Danny Trejo, Becky G and Ivan Cornejo as a contemporary Latino family, loosely modeled on the 1990s sitcom Married… with Children. Each takes a distinct family role, and Chavarria himself turns up in a cameo in the closing moments. Photography is credited to Andres Norwood. The choice is smarter than a celebrity-count headline suggests. Sitcom families are the most standardized visual grammar American television ever produced: the couch, the doorway, the reaction shot. Running a Mexican-American family through that grammar, in head-to-toe black leather, does something a straight-faced fashion campaign could not. It borrows the format's warmth and its irreverence at the same time. It is also consistent with everything else Chavarria has done. He has spent years using commercial platforms to put Chicano identity in front of audiences that do not usually get it, from the ACLU collaboration to the Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl capsule to the telenovela-styled Zara campaign. This is the same instinct applied to a sheepskin boot company.
UGG's collaboration program has generally worked by lending its silhouettes out. This one works the other way. Chavarria took the archive seriously enough to pull from 1999, and UGG let him build something structurally new in the Guard Boot. Whether the shin guard finds an audience is a separate question. The Hotel Slipper and the Otzo Clog will sell. The Guard Boot is the statement, and statements are supposed to be uncomfortable.
The UGG x Willy Chavarria collection releases September 10, 2026 at UGG.com, select UGG retail locations, and select retailers worldwide. A price ladder ranging from roughly $190 for the Hotel Chavarria Slipper up to $800 for the Guard Boot has been circulating ahead of the drop, but UGG has not confirmed pricing publicly and we have not been able to verify it against a brand source. Treat it as unofficial until the collection goes live.
