“You have to meet Julian Louie, his stuff is crazy, the technique is couture-ish, but the clothes are just cool.” So said an industry friend as we chatted waiting for a show to start at New York Fashion Week. I had already made an appointment to meet Louie at this studio to see his new label, Aubero, after the week of shows, but my interest was piqued.
Hanging in the designer’s Brooklyn studio is a tailored overcoat that resembles a bag stuffed with colorful confetti. Under its top silk habotai layer lie a plethora of small strips of fabric Louie has collected and repurposed from vintage garments and scraps from other styles in the collection. They’ve been stitched and hand basted to a layer of silk dupioni, which in turn is the top layer of a cotton padding quilted undercoat. The whole thing is five layers. “Couture-ish” is right.
The California-born Louie, 39, launched Aubero in 2022. The label has been selected as a semifinalist at this year’s LVMH Prize, one of the four American labels to make the list. This is the designer’s second run with a label of his own, having first launched an eponymous collection, Julian Louie, in 2009 to acclaim in the New York scene—New York magazine crowned him the “new prince of fashion” following his debut collection. Louie has over a decade of experience working for other brands under his belt. He studied architecture at The Cooper Union, but internships at Imitation of Christ and Calvin Klein led to a career in fashion. When at the latter, then designer Francisco Costa took Louie under his wing, selecting him for Vogue Italia’s “Protégé Project.” After his time at there and designing his first label, Louie moved on to work as a design director at J. Mendel and most recently as a womenswear design consultant at Amiri.
The name Aubero is a riff of Oberon, the king of fairies in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (The label was named Oberon initially, though Louie changed it for trademark purposes.) Louie wanted to be an actor when he was younger, a fantasy that began when he saw a performance of the same play in his hometown. His menswear proposal with Aubero is certainly playful and theatrical, but it’s rooted in an everyday pragmatism that makes it all the more compelling. His intricate and sophisticated material exploration driven by vintage and repurposed fabrics is offset by the familiarity and simplicity of his silhouettes. The approach, in a way, is preservationist: An antique chiffon skirt has been carefully taken apart and transformed into a new garment encased in a pair of casual shorts; and a delicate sequin embroidery reminiscent of the 1920s, found partially shredded, is on display on a jacket. As Louie’s pieces are worn, the delicate materials he’s put in his garments-as-vitrines will continue to age and take on new shapes.
“You can keep the integrity of this really fragile textile and turn it into something that is legible and wearable,” said Louie, “there’s an immediacy, otherwise it’s an art project, which I’m not interested in.” The idea is not to destroy vintage pieces or erase their history, but to preserve it.
Aubero was born out of Louie spending time in Tucson, Arizona with Salima Boufelfel and Roberto Cowan of Desert Vintage. The pair have a sprawling archive of vintage and antique garments and textiles, which Louie picked over, identifying the material that was unsellable—pieces ripped beyond repair, disintegrating fabrics—to use as raw material. “Never in my life had I had that time where it’s just purely creative,” said Louie, “so this grew organically. In a way, I always had an idea of where it was going, but it was the process of getting my hands on the material that got me here.” Landscape is a recurring visual theme for Louie, who said he looks to develop textures that are evocative of landscapes, particularly that of Northern California. Just like a landscape, his collection becomes richer the closer one gets to it: “It’s a very intimate brand, these textures demand a closer look in a way that you almost get lost in them,” said the designer.
Louie describes Aubero as a “laboratory approach” at working with material that is unwearable and unusable. This perspective informed a broader material approach in which Louie also works with scrap fabric, offering an “almost circular” use of material. “It’s also about introducing some scalable product,” said Louie, “from the development of production come all the scraps that are reworked into other techniques.” The result is an eclectic but considered lineup, some pieces are deceivingly simple and others rich in texture and material. Aubero is currently available at concept stores and smaller boutiques including Blake in Chicago, and Just One Eye and Maxfield in Los Angeles, an intentional choice by Louie to scale his label measuredly.
“There’s so much freedom in the scale of the project right now,” said Louie. “With a brand like this, I can do pieces that are labor intensive and in limited quantities.” Still, Louie is interested in scale, and wants to operate the brand on a level that is strong and sustainable but keeps the intimacy of the product. Part of the collection—taffeta separates, reworked denim—he can scale and reproduce, and part of it is one-offs that can be replicated with other materials, yet not repeated. The approach to the latter is in a way reminiscent of how Emily Adams Bode Aujla works: she built Bode with a collection of garments made of repurposed vintage materials and made it scalable by offering not duplicates but one-offs in the same style and similar fabrications. Louie, very much to his credit, has created a singular and compelling take on a now familiar approach, and the fact that he’s also established a system that will enable him to continue to expand shows potential. That his collection will be on display today and tomorrow in Paris at the LVMH Prize semifinals surely does, too.
