The spring 2025 Luar show took place outdoors at Rockefeller Plaza. To set the proper mood, the back part of two cars filled with chucheros flanked the runway on either end. A chuchero is a box that contains multiple speakers, subwoofers, and other equipment that turn cars into heart-attack inducing sound machines. In the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, this “sport” is known as voceteo. The proof that they were legit is the amount of editors that jumped out of their seats when the first sounds pumped through the speakers. The music, a melange of techno, booming bass, and maybe even a Nine Inch Nails sample, didn t let up one second during the whole show.
The chucheros made sense both as a tie to his designer Raul López’s Dominican roots, but also as a modern iteration of punk attitudes. (What s more punk than blasting your music at ungodly volumes to stake a claim for your own self-made culture?) The starting point for this collection was the designer’s life during the late ’90s and early aughts when he was still a teenager trying to square his life at home in Brooklyn with his Dominican family and friends with the world he was encountering when he would venture to the Lower East Side to hang out. “I was all teen angst and trying to figure out who I was, hanging out with the punk girls, the crazy girls, and the art girls downtown but I was still dressing like my family wanted to,” he explained a day before the show at his Wall Street studio. “I needed to have a skinny pant to hang with the girls, but then I could wear a button up to be with my family… my hair could have a nice little bang.” You know, the asymmetric kind we all wore back then. “I was in my punk era, being rebellious.”
Although López referenced New York Dolls and CBGB’s and the traditional NYC punk scene that we’re all familiar with, this was not a carbon copy homage with mohawks, studs, and safety pins. “Punk is a feeling, it’s an attitude, it’s how you present yourself out of the norm and stand out and be you,” he said.
López has made dramatic silhouettes that subvert and exalt the body his signature, and they were in full display for spring. There were taffeta pieces cut to hulking proportions that served as a kind of armor while completely revealing the body underneath and sumptuous (like truly sumptuous) oversized leather jacket-dress with oversized curved sleeves, cinched to high heaven at the waist, and made from a leopard printed pony panel on the front and stamped python on the back that closed the show. A total of 53 looks (that never got boing) truly offered something for everyone without being everything to everyone (a crucial distinction), including stretchy workout sets with his signature twisted rouleau buttons (“for my Lululemon girls”); flocked denim used on classics like a jacket, or a pair of high waist workwear-inspired trousers, but also on short-shorts that zipped off around the leg bikini-style; and a new line of in-house shoes that included boots with kitten heels, flat oxfords, and oxford mules with a sexy curved heel, all in leather, all about to become the only shoe in New York City next season. And while we can’t go on describing every single look, extra attention must be paid to a series of pieces including a long mermaid A-line skirt, a classic pant suit, and a cool cropped track jacket, done in what looked to be liquid black metal so shiny that it made you want to lick it or maybe dive into it. As the model who wore the latter walked away, the bottom of the hood (or was it a veil?) was revealed to be filled with a bouquet of upside down dollar bills.
In fact, there were lots of dramatic moments as the models walked away on the runway—not only from the hoods included in many of the looks, and which López had rigged with boning so they created a cocoon-like shape that stood away from the body (best seen on a series of long knitted dresses that were absolute standouts, as was a classic khaki trench coat); but also in seams that wrapped or fell around the body, oftentimes with the fabric trailing on the floor or floating around the model. López had named the collection “En Boca Quedó,” a Dominican saying usually used when leaving a conversation that means to say I’m leaving, but now you’ll speak of me. “It can be a form of shade, but also very loving, in a funny haha shade way,” he explained. After tonight’s show, López’s name will surely be on everyone’s lips. And not just because Madonna sat front row.
