arlier this year, on an overcast spring day in Manhattan, the fashion designer Raul Lopez stood inside a suite at the Plaza Hotel wearing black underwear, a waist-cinching pink corset, and a white plastic shopping bag over his head. He then slid into a black turtleneck and emerged a ghastly sight—the bag outlined his open mouth and nostrils, making him look like something out of a horror film. “You should go out like that,” an assistant joked. It was the first Monday of May, and Lopez was preparing for the Met Gala, the fund-raising party and giant media event hosted every year by the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute. He peeled off the bag and walked toward a mirror to confirm that it had done its job, keeping his gelled hair and light makeup intact. Satisfied, he exhaled.
Lopez is slim and handsome, with high cheekbones underscored by a meticulously groomed beard. He brushes and gels his eyebrows upward in aggressive spikes that give him a slightly menacing quality—which is dispelled the moment he speaks, with the vocal fry of a Valley girl, the accent of a Brooklyn-raised Dominican, and an unplaceable, slightly transatlantic cadence. His conversation moves seamlessly between English and Spanish and is peppered with queer slang. Earlier, while a barber sharpened his buzz cut in the bathroom, I’d listened to him describe his nerves about walking the carpet. “I can feel people criticizing me through their TVs, y yo me pongo loca así,” he said, using female pronouns for himself, a thing he does often, tongue-in-cheek.
Lopez occupies a peculiar place in the landscape of New York fashion: schooled veteran and perpetually rising star. Few, if any, question his talent, but many have wondered whether he can sustain a business. He first achieved renown as the co-founder of the label Hood By Air, which he created with the designer Shayne Oliver in 2006. They made streetwear—drop-crotch pants and extra-long T-shirts—but their garments were distorted and embellished to sometimes disturbing, and frequently homoerotic, effect. It was clothing that “embodied the hood” but “looked expensive,” as Lopez put it to me. He left the brand in 2010. Two years later, Oliver relaunched Hood By Air, and it became one of the defining creative forces of the next decade in fashion, acclaimed by industry heavyweights and worn by pop stars, including Rihanna and Justin Bieber. Lopez, meanwhile, created his own brand, initially called Luar Zepol, his name backward, and now simply Luar. He quickly garnered a passionate following among the downtown fashion crowd, but for a long time commercial success was elusive—and the flowers of industry validation have been doled out to him slowly, one by one.
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