Before Luar\u2019s SS27 New York Fashion Week show, titled Christopher Street Columbus, Raul Lopez showed us his moodboard.\u00a0 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\u2019s become a fashion inspiration. \u201cI was like, \u2018This is it,\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cI knew I was onto something\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lopez\u2019s 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 \u201cobsessed\u201d with, his name representing the beginning of a story that Dominicans \u201cdid not author\u201d. \u201cThis collection sits in the tension between those two inheritances: the street and the empire. The lived and the imposed,\u201d he writes in the show notes.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
On the runway, this collision of past and present, owned and disowned, came together through a mashup of aged leather biker jackets, \u201cpunk elements\u201d, 15th and 16th-century silhouettes, flamboyant lace ruffle sleeves, tailoring, bloomer pants and historical feathered hats. There were also Dominican cacao references, including a \u201crotted cacao\u201d coat and cacao silk print, throughout the collection \u2013 something he says was inspired by his research on jacquard cacao beans once being a form of currency in the country.<\/p>\n
Lopez likes to think of this season\u2019s 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. \u201cSometimes I\u2019m like, \u2018Am I a vampire?\u2019\u201d he says. \u201cBecause why do I remember and think so much of that era? It\u2019s kind of weird.\u201d Growing up, when he would hang out on Christopher Street, Lopez never felt he entirely \u201cfit in\u201d there, but didn\u2019t feel at home in his own neighbourhood either. \u201cI figured out a way to dress myself to provoke people, make people uncomfortable and reclaim that too,\u201d he says. \u201cLike, \u2018Oh, so you think I\u2019m crazy?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2018s old high school and somewhere he\u2018s been trying to stage a show for years. \u201cI think it was just the universe waiting for this collection,\u201d he adds. \u201cI\u2019m so excited to give everyone the world\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Scroll through the gallery at the top of the page for the entire spring 2027 collection<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Luar\u2019s SS27 New York Fashion Week show, titled Christopher Street Columbus, Raul Lopez showed us his moodboard.\u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":348431,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[1149,27643,27642,27644,27645,27646,27647,27648,1242,749,27640,27641,2538,9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-348430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-art","tag-dazed","tag-dazed-confused","tag-dazed-confused-magazine","tag-dazed-and-confused","tag-dazed-and-confused-magazine","tag-dazedconfused","tag-dazeddigital","tag-fashion","tag-film","tag-ideas","tag-ideas-sharing-network","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348430","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=348430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/348430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/348431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=348430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=348430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=348430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}