Luar Spring 2027: Returning Home to Rule the World

by · WWD
Luar Spring 2027 ready-to-wear collection at New York Fashion Week.Rodin Banica/WWD

How do you top a past show at Rockefeller Center? If you’re Raúl Lopez, you go home.

For spring, Lopez brought Luar to Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, N.Y., staging his show beneath the 120-foot-wide Unisphere, not far from Flushing High School, where he was a student, and Corona, where his family lived. Before the show began, people were already gathering on public benches beyond the fashion week barricades, watching the spectacle take shape. That permeability was intentional. “We got to have the Corona and Flushing girls come through,” Lopez said at a preview. “You know, why not?”

The homecoming had been telegraphed by the invitation: a childhood photograph of Lopez in a diaper, pearls and comically oversize black boots. But nostalgia was hardly the point. Titled “Christopher Street Columbus,” the collection placed two Christophers in tension: Christopher Street, where Lopez came of age in queer New York, and Christopher Columbus, whose name, for the Dominican American designer, carries an inheritance of colonization and imposed identity.

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“I’m reversing the voyage now,” Lopez said. “It’s like a new Luar world order.”

The clothes pulled from 15th- and 16th-century dress without becoming beholden to it. Monumental shoulders — a Luar signature — found kinship with the architecture of court dress. Voluminous breeches ballooned from beneath narrow striped jackets; spiral sleeves amplified the upper body; elongated trousers and severe tailoring countered the historical excess. One look paired enormous rounded breeches with a slim jacket and flat Kenner sandals, part of a collaboration with the Brazilian footwear brand.

Lopez developed custom lace in Portugal, deliberately aging it and adding “whiskers” so it appeared to have survived centuries of wear. Cacao, once precious enough to function as currency but quick to rot, became silk and a jacquard depicting its decay. Ostrich feathers were curled for bounce and movement. Fraying, burnished leather and painterly textiles accumulated as the spectral opening grew increasingly lush.

Then there were the vampires.

Lopez imagined Columbus unknowingly arriving with vampires aboard his ship, creatures who remained in New York and eventually found their way to Christopher Street. Models with faces painted an eerie chalk white appeared intermittently, as though these centuries-old inhabitants had wandered into the lineup. One, in a lean cobalt column, looked less Gothic than contemporary. The joke worked because Lopez didn’t labor it.

New Luar bags joined collaborations with MCM, Kenner and Cadbury, the latter extending the cacao story all the way to chocolate. In lesser hands, the references, collaborations and historical propositions could have become hyperbolic. Instead, his rigor came from allowing each to rub against the other without sanding away the friction.

And perhaps that is why this homecoming landed. Luar has grown considerably, but Lopez’s world has not become less specific as the platform has become bigger. He didn’t bring Queens into fashion as an aesthetic proposition; he brought fashion to Queens and left the gates porous enough for Queens to watch back.

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Nas’ “If I Ruled the World” carried the finale as Lopez’s cast circled beneath that enormous illuminated globe. After a collection about who gets to name places, people and histories, the image needed little explanation.

For one night in Flushing, it was Raúl Lopez’s world.