\n\tHow do you top a past show at Rockefeller Center? If you\u2019re Ra\u00fal Lopez, you go home.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor 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. \u201cWe got to have the Corona and Flushing girls come through,\u201d Lopez said at a preview. \u201cYou know, why not?\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe 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 \u201cChristopher Street Columbus,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cI\u2019m reversing the voyage now,\u201d Lopez said. \u201cIt\u2019s like a new Luar world order.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe clothes pulled from 15th- and 16th-century dress without becoming beholden to it. Monumental shoulders \u2014 a Luar signature \u2014 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. <\/p>\n
\n\tLopez developed custom lace in Portugal, deliberately aging it and adding \u201cwhiskers\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tThen there were the vampires.<\/p>\n
\n\tLopez 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\u2019t labor it.<\/p>\n
\n\tNew 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd perhaps that is why this homecoming landed. Luar has grown considerably, but Lopez\u2019s world has not become less specific as the platform has become bigger. He didn\u2019t bring Queens into fashion as an aesthetic proposition; he brought fashion to Queens and left the gates porous enough for Queens to watch back.<\/p>\n
\n\tNas\u2019 \u201cIf I Ruled the World\u201d carried the finale as Lopez\u2019s cast circled beneath that enormous illuminated globe. After a collection about who gets to name places, people and histories, the image needed little explanation.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor one night in Flushing, it was Ra\u00fal Lopez\u2019s world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How do you top a past show at Rockefeller Center? If you\u2019re Ra\u00fal Lopez, you go home. For…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347423,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[91953,9,24,6231,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-347422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-fashion-show-reviews","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-fashion-week","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347422\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}