Luar Spring 2025 Ready-to-Wear Collection

The Luar show in spring 2025 took place outdoors at Rockefeller Plaza. To create the right atmosphere, the back of two cars was decorated with chucheros flanked the runway at both ends. chuchero is a box that contains several speakers, subwoofers and other devices that turn cars into heart attack-inducing sound machines. In the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, this “sport” is known as Agree. Proof that they meant business is the number of editors who jumped out of their seats when the first notes blared from the speakers. The music, a mix of techno, thumping bass and maybe even a Nine Inch Nails sample, didn't let up for a second throughout the show.

The chucheros made sense both as a connection to its designer, Raul López's, Dominican roots and as a modern iteration of the punk attitude. (What's more punk than cranking your music up to unchristian volumes to lay claim to your own self-created culture?) The starting point for this collection was the designer's life in the late '90s and early 2000s, when he was still a teenager trying to reconcile his life at home in Brooklyn with his Dominican family and friends with the world he experienced when he ventured to the Lower East Side to hang out. “I was full of teenage angst, trying to figure out who I was. I hung out with the punk girls, the crazy girls, and the art girls downtown, but I still dressed the way my family wanted me to,” he explained in his Wall Street studio a day before the show. “I needed tight pants to hang out with the girls, but then I could wear a button-up shirt to be with my family… my hair could have a nice little fringe.” You know, the asymmetrical kind we all wore back then. “I was in my punk era and rebellious.”

Although López referenced the New York Dolls and CBGB's and the traditional New York punk scene we all know, this wasn't an exact homage with mohawks, studs and safety pins. “Punk is a feeling, it's an attitude, it's the way of presenting yourself outside the norm, standing out and being yourself,” he said.