Before Luar’s SS27 New York Fashion Week show, titled Christopher Street Columbus, Raul Lopez showed us his moodboard. It featured a picture of Christopher Columbus, alongside a photograph of an older gentleman Lopez recently saw walking around in Flatiron, who has no idea he’s become a fashion inspiration. “I was like, ‘This is it,’” he says. “I knew I was onto something”.
Lopez’s latest collection moves between two Christophers. The first is Christopher Street, the queer epicentre where he came of age in New York. The second is Christopher Columbus, a figure the Dominican designer says he is “obsessed” with, his name representing the beginning of a story that Dominicans “did not author”. “This collection sits in the tension between those two inheritances: the street and the empire. The lived and the imposed,” he writes in the show notes.
On the runway, this collision of past and present, owned and disowned, came together through a mashup of aged leather biker jackets, “punk elements”, 15th and 16th-century silhouettes, flamboyant lace ruffle sleeves, tailoring, bloomer pants and historical feathered hats. There were also Dominican cacao references, including a “rotted cacao” coat and cacao silk print, throughout the collection – something he says was inspired by his research on jacquard cacao beans once being a form of currency in the country.
Lopez likes to think of this season’s Luar models as vampires who came on the boat with Columbus, but then went to school in Queens, hung out downtown and are still living in New York today. Of course, Lopez himself went to Flushing High School. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘Am I a vampire?’” he says. “Because why do I remember and think so much of that era? It’s kind of weird.” Growing up, when he would hang out on Christopher Street, Lopez never felt he entirely “fit in” there, but didn’t feel at home in his own neighbourhood either. “I figured out a way to dress myself to provoke people, make people uncomfortable and reclaim that too,” he says. “Like, ‘Oh, so you think I’m crazy?’”
If the Christopher Street Columbus models were vampires, the collection would be their homecoming. It took place at the Unisphere, an outdoor space in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, right by Lopez‘s old high school and somewhere he‘s been trying to stage a show for years. “I think it was just the universe waiting for this collection,” he adds. “I’m so excited to give everyone the world”.
Scroll through the gallery at the top of the page for the entire spring 2027 collection