Luar feels good on your lips. The brand’s SS25 show was titled EN BOCA QUEDÓ, a phrase that roughly translates to: “In your mouth, my name stays.” “I thought about it, and it’s true,” says Raul Lopez, the brand’s founder, says on a video call. No matter which way you slice it, the people are talking.
Luar – that’s the designer’s name backwards – first launched in 2011. After a forced two-year hiatus from 2019 to 2021 (attributed to financial struggles and burnout), the brand has shown six collections, which have become de facto ballroom runways, and earned the coveted spot of closing out New York Fashion Week last season. This season, the brand’s larger-than life silhouettes were more self-assured than ever. Crustacean-like, cocooned hoods sat atop knit dresses, well-suited to the Bene Gesserit in Denis Villaneuve’s Dune. Glossy black taffeta numbers glided down the runway as well as denim flocked in velvet. “Denim to me is a very New York staple for all different social classes,” says Lopez. “Kind of like a skin.”
Luar’s reach today wouldn’t have been possible without its designer’s sharp sensibilities, but he’s also become the kind of local hero that New Yorkers show up for. It’s rare to take a stroll on the Lower East Side where you don’t spot an ‘Ana’ bag – and many of these will only be one or two steps removed from an encounter with the designer himself. (I have a non-fashion friend who met and kiki’d with the designer IRL this summer, swiftly followed by her first-ever Ana bag purchase.)
“I’m gonna do this the way I wanna do it. If you don’t like it then too bad.”
“There really isn’t much to say because it’s real,” he says when asked about the impact of the community of friends, family and magazine editors that has formed around the brand. Lopez is vocal when it comes to brands seeming to be ‘inclusive’: it’s something that serves certain designers in terms of leveraging clout, but which he perceives as inauthentic. “There’s a lot of clickbait right now, especially within the fashion industry, where designers are running with narratives and talking about all the boxes being checked. I’m just like, ‘Are you really that person? Are you sitting at a table and breaking bread with these people when the cameras are off?’ That to me is real.”
“I’m still, like I always say, ‘in the trenches,’” he continues. “[I want] the brand [to be] more than a brand. It’s a metaphor as well as a tangible thing. I want people to see that you can obtain it if you really want it.”
At the show at Rockefeller Center, the historic building’s 193-flag salute was replaced with black flags (along with silver and gold ones to represent the AMEX exclusive colorways of the Ana bag) emblazoned with the cursive capital ‘L’ of the logo. A legion of A-listers showed up in support of the designer including Madonna (outfitted in an oversized camel coat dress from the Fall 2023 show), her daughter Lourdes Leon, as well as Ice Spice, Tinashe and Shygirl. (Last season, the allure of Luar was strong enough to get Beyoncé to Bushwick.)
“I wanted to play off my late-teens angst era: [how I] navigated my family and their friends, but also came downtown to the concrete jungle. A lot of that primal “survival of the fittest”, where I was trying to cope and fit into both worlds and dress myself accordingly. You can see in the collection that there are pieces that kind of are ‘blazers’, but with their invisible zips you can deconstruct them to be more punk.” The straddling of both of those worlds represents the core of SS25 for the designer, Punk Rock being a major inspiration sartorially, musically, and fundamentally: with the New York Dolls Glam Rock, and CBGB all namechecked as references.
For Lopez, this collection represents finally feeling comfortable in his skin, a result of the change and transformation he’s experienced in the past few years. “I’m presenting and showing this story the right way and not accommodating myself to what the fashion industry wants me,” he says. “Last season was a build up to this, where I was like, Okay, I’m gonna do this the way I wanna do it and if you don’t like it then too bad.”
Text: Scarlett Newman
Photography: Ashley Markle