Luar brings drama to New York Fashion Week

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It wouldn’t be a Luar runway without a little drama. And on Tuesday, the label’s fall 2024 show packed all that in, plus more. Hosted at the usual Brooklyn warehouse in Bushwick, guests could not contain their excitement-they were jumping up and down, screaming, pushing through the crowd, standing on their seats, phones up-when Beyoncé was spotted front row, glitzed up in a shining rhinestone suit, white cowboy hat and holding a supersize, iridescent version of Luar’s signature Ana bag in hand. Tina Knowles and Solange were seated nearby, too; the ultra-glamorous trinity was there to support Solange Knowles’s son, Daniel “Julez” Smith Jr, for his runway debut in the show. But even such a spectacle couldn’t distract Luar fans from one of Raul Lopez’s strongest collections to date, dubbed “Deceptionista.”

“The word metrosexual came up in my head,” Lopez told me from inside his studio a few days before the show. “I call metrosexuals ‘strays.’ It’s like a stray gay. They do everything gays do: they give you the two kisses, they dress you, they’re obsessed with really chic women and cool gays, but they won’t sleep with you. I was thinking, whatever happened to this word and why did it go away? Why do we always think metrosexual people are gay? Why can’t they just be the way they are? And then I went into this really crazy deep dive at 3am and I started Googling things.”

He became “obsessed with the ’80s-not the 1980s, but the 1680s and the 1780s, when men were super flamboyant.” His research of the Elizabethan era and Rococo artworks manifested in the collection through glossed-up, shiny jackets that contorted the shoulders, rendering them not far from the kind of hulking football pads that were on display at the Super Bowl just a few days prior. Luar framed these shapes with elongated gold necklaces draped from shoulder to shoulder, or fabric hoods that skewed freakishly medieval.

The irony of contrasts was not lost on Lopez: Sheer zebra-print blouses meshed with sturdy jackets with sprays of fluffy fur. Jeans came tight and printed and pants were low-slung and sculpted or constructed with an ostrich texture and slashed above the knees. It was a hodgepodge of expressive, gussied-up metrosexuality through the decades, taking a little bit from every era.

The designer gleaned more literal inspiration from corsets, armour and metrosexual men from the early 2000s like Matthew McConaughey and David Beckham-both of whom were on Lopez’s mood board this season. For the Luar gals, Lopez’s metrosexual concept showed itself in bold shapes on female models. Towards the end of the show, the shoulders got bigger, higher, and more structured, the colour palette receding from deep navys, plums and browns to corporate blacks and grays.

Make no mistake: these are clothes that look and feel expensive. “We did these Chevron techniques where it looks like they’re slashed. It calls to these really rich, luxe leathers and beautiful, exotic fabrics like Mongolian lamb,” Lopez said. It’s clear the designer is not just a provocateur of interesting shapes. He is an artist engaged in creating cultural discourse.