Raul Lopez Wants to Be American Fashion
In the fall of 2014, Lopez staged an official Fashion Week event at Webster Hall. He recalled thinking, I’m about to hit it, I’m about to make it now—until he realized that he wouldn’t have enough money to produce the collection for retailers to sell. He was still cashing unemployment checks and spending long periods in the D.R. Then he was contacted by the Department of Labor. “They knew everything,” he told me. He lost his benefits. By this point, his friends were supportive mostly in spirit; many of them had started working at larger companies, including at Hood By Air, and could no longer devote their time to assisting him.
Demoralized, Lopez put his work on hiatus for the next three years. Then, one night, he caught up with Oliver. In the course of the conversation, his old friend goaded him into trying his hand at womenswear. The timing was serendipitous: Cervantes, Lopez’s friend, was engaged to be married, and she had asked him to design her dress. He agreed. “When that dress dropped, literally the internet broke,” Lopez recalled. He didn’t have to tell me, because I remembered it well: photos of Cervantes’s wedding, in Michoacán, Mexico, were everywhere in fashion media and on my Instagram feed in July, 2018. Her gown featured layers of white gauze draped around a corset, wrapped across one of Cervantes’s arms, and spiralling down a leg. A circle of translucent fabric, not so much a veil as a halo, fanned out around her head. “It really was the most wonderful, unique wedding dress I think I’ve ever seen,” Chioma Nnadi, the head of editorial content for British Vogue, told me. Lopez appeared to have hit his stride—the gown epitomized the unconventional opulence of his design language.
That September, Lopez relaunched his brand, as Luar, and presented a unisex collection during Fashion Week. Rihanna was photographed walking around New York City in an oversized, four-armed blazer straight off the runway. It was another breakthrough—but that blazer was never produced for retail. The celebrity co-sign generated prestige, which Lopez already had; what he still lacked was money. In that area, his peers were outshining him. In 2017, Telfar Clemens won four hundred thousand dollars from the C.F.D.A./Vogue Fashion Fund; later, he scaled up production of the Telfar Shopping Bag, which became a commercial hit. The next year, just two months after his relaunch, Lopez was a finalist for the same award, but it went to Kerby Jean-Raymond. “After that, I just kind of shut down,” Lopez told me. He retired from fashion for the third time and became aimless and depressed. Without realizing it, he lost thirty pounds.
The day after I visited Lopez’s office on Water Street, I went with him and two Luar employees to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, where a public area would soon be converted into a runway for the label’s Spring 2025 ready-to-wear collection. Lopez was there to meet with the event’s producers and some executives from American Express, which was partially funding the after-party.
It was a sweltering afternoon, and the streets were populated by a dowdy mass of midtown office workers and tourists wearing sensible shoes. Lopez sported an all-white ensemble of pants flared mid-calf and a bulbous jacket. He strolled around the site with his lips pursed and his hands crossed over his chest, reaching up periodically to adjust a pair of tortoiseshell glasses that kept sliding down his nose, unaware of, or maybe just accustomed to, all the heads turning around him. At one point, as I watched him from a distance, a young girl approached me and asked if he was famous.
When I rejoined the group, I heard Lopez saying, perhaps more to himself than to anyone else, “This needs to be fab. We need to make the world tremble for twenty minutes.” He snapped his fingers. “Like, bitch, step your pussy up.” The rest of the team nodded solemnly.
It may have been the curved-up shoulder pads on his jacket, which made him resemble a cat in Halloween pose, but Lopez looked tense, his eyes wide. At one point, he wondered aloud how Luar could make Rockefeller Center—a place “that’s run by Republicans and the whitest people in the world,” as he put it—his space. The question carried at least as much anxiety as bravado; this venue felt more symbolic than any he’d occupied before. “My mom used to bring me here all the time when I was a kid,” he told me.
Lopez’s fortunes began to shift after the pandemic hit. When New York went into lockdown, he was invited to stay at Palm Heights, a resort in the Cayman Islands, owned by Gabriella Khalil, whom Lopez had recently met through a mutual friend. He grew close to Khalil, whose ambitions for the hotel and for other properties seemed to have something in common with Lopez’s sensibility. (Khalil also has a stake in the building on Water Street that houses the Luar office, and is the creative director of both spaces.) Lopez spent about two years at Palm Heights, and, as always, began to feel the inexorable draw of designing. “I was starting to live for it again, feeling juicy,” he recalled. “My room looked like a serial killer’s—sketches and references taped all over the walls, on the tables, on the floors.”
He was self-conscious about his previous failures. “I looked nuts, coming and going, going and coming,” he told me. He decided that returning to fashion would be a Hail Mary; this time, he was determined to make Luar profitable. He sketched jeans, hoodies, T-shirts, even a handbag: entry-level products that would attract a wider base of customers. He got an infusion of cash from Your Friends in New York, a short-lived incubator program conceived by Jean-Raymond, the man who’d eclipsed him for the Fashion Fund award. (Y.F.I.N.Y. was quietly dissolved in 2022; The Cut later reported that former employees of Jean-Raymond had accused him of mismanaging funds within his brand, which he denied, stating, “To suggest that we used funds inappropriately is wholly false.” When I asked Lopez about Y.F.I.N.Y., he praised the program’s impact on his career and changed the subject.) The money helped fund a comeback show at New York Fashion Week, in 2021, which featured not only avant-garde garments but also sleek basics. Almost every model carried what Lopez called the Ana bag—a leather trapezoid that dangles from a circular handle. Its geometry is surprisingly simple, though something about the proportions registers as offbeat. Lopez named it after the women in his family, primarily his mother. When the Ana bag became available for preorder, it reportedly sold out within hours.
