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Nerds and Nudity

Looks from Todd Snyder.Credit...Stefania Curto for The New York Times

Whenever people talk about the icons of 20th-century men’s wear, there is a roster of names you can always rely on hearing. There is Cary Grant. There is Fred Astaire. There are Marlon Brando, James Dean, Robert Redford, Paul Newman and, at a slightly later date, the musicians Miles Davis, David Bowie and Bryan Ferry.

Yet there is one influential figure who hardly ever gets his proper due for the abiding influence he has exerted on men’s fashion. That is Steve Urkel, the prototypical fictional nerd portrayed on the sitcom “Family Matters” by the actor Jaleel White.

There are plenty of reasons Urkel should have lodged in the collective consciousness of an earlier era, not the least of these his catchphrases “Whoa, Mama!” and “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” Yet it is the sartorially distinctive Urkel that concerns us here, he of the goggle-eyed glasses, the crisply ironed denim flood pants, the red suspenders and the grandpa cardigans. Knowingly or not, designers have been mining the Urkel style vocabulary for years — he is the geek that keeps on giving — Todd Snyder being just the latest.

“I wanted to call the show ‘Jocks and Nerds,’” Mr. Snyder said backstage before his show at Pier 59 in Chelsea on Monday evening. “But then I felt the timing wasn’t right for it.” Instead he gave his show the anodyne title “Old (New) School” and then went right ahead and barreled into trigger-warning territory to exploit all the Urkel codes.

There were shrunken sweaters paired with oversize denim trousers in the light blue dad wash that are catnip to millennial guys and a vague source of shame to the olds from the ’80s who wore them the first time around. There was a show-opening belted bathrobe coat in houndstooth checked wool, followed by a parade of wide-wale corduroy car coats paired with rib-hugging shirts adorned with floral patterns that screamed thrift shop dollar rack.

In true Urkel fashion, these were worn over shrunken striped turtlenecks.

There were, of course, the usual hoodies, because Mr. Snyder made his name as a designer who came early to the wedding of sartorial styling to street wear (and also because he was doing Champion collaborations back when Demna Gvasalia was a still a gleam in his daddy’s eye). There were leather shirt jackets with contrast sleeves and breast pockets so ostentatiously nerdy that you wondered why the show’s stylist left out a plastic pocket protector.

Much of it was in a palette — mustards, burgundy, the smutty pink that skaters made it cool for guys to wear again — so off-kilter only someone with Mr. Snyder’s chops would even venture near it. That is the signature skill of this Iowa-reared designer who, while he seldom strays out of his mainstream lane, manages to introduce just enough innovation each season to ensure his survival in a landscape littered with the wreckage of competitors’ defunct careers.

“I like taking something old and frumpy and making it new and young,” Mr. Snyder said. In the absence of shock and awe, that will do.

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A look from Willy Chavarria.Credit...John Taggart for The New York Times

Willy Chavarria, conversely, is a designer determined to startle and move, to import not only elements of his personal narrative (he identifies himself as a Chicano from California’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley, where his family worked as harvesters) into his work, but also his current emotional state.

For his debut several seasons back, Mr. Chavarria installed a selection of street-cast models — some trans, all minorities — in prison cage settings as a symbol of “brown power,” his way of expressing opposition to the racially exclusionary rhetoric of the Trump presidential campaign.

His last show was held in a leather bar in Midtown Manhattan that is one of the surviving relics of New York gay culture from a time before AIDS. “It is all about reflecting how we feel as a community of people,” Mr. Chavarria said backstage after his Monday evening show, referring to the little-appreciated fact that no inherent contradiction exists between caring deeply about the fit of a biker jacket and about immigration policy.

“The first show was angry and resistant,” he said. “The second show, at the Eagle, was romantic, loving and sexual. This is a sad show because we’re in a sad time.”

Yet despite the tears painted or glued onto the models’ tattooed faces, the show felt less sad then somber, expressive of both an emotional charge largely absent from contemporary fashion and of the technical skills Mr. Chavarria honed during design stints at Ralph Lauren and American Eagle Outfitters before going out on his own.

Proportion play, asymmetry and contrast are signature tools of this designer, and here he paired supersize hooded denim trench coats with billowing denims; placed shrunken canvas work wear jackets atop rib-hugging leather vests; and presented armoring (yet luxurious and lightweight) lab coats reminiscent of early Yohji Yamamoto in a lineup that also played up the fragility of the body beneath the clothes.

Shoeless or shirtless is how Mr. Chavarria sent out some of his models, and also — in the case of Roe Taylor, a 3-month-old whose father, John, tenderly carried her onto the runway to close out the show — clad in the scrap of unstitched cloth that is the first thing most people on the planet will ever wear.

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