Raul Lopez hasn’t exactly had a summer. “I’ve been working on the show, so my summer has mostly been work, work, and more work,” the Luar founder says, laughing.
The spring 2027 collection took over Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in Queens, New York, with Lopez staging the show beneath the Unisphere. The offering mixed Tudor-era dress, queer New York references, Dominican history, and ideas around colonization and reclamation.
That translated into exaggerated historical silhouettes filtered through Lopez’s downtown attitude, and what the designer described as dressing “for survival,” to fit in, look good, and rebel.
“It’s been pleasant,” Lopez says of the recent tumult. “I’ve been enjoying the moments in between everything.”
There are worse places to finally clock off than the Balearic island of Ibiza. Lopez has arrived on the white isle via the fashion parties and pizza of Milan Fashion Week to launch Luar’s first-ever swimwear collection, including a limited-edition collaboration with The Standard: a sunshine-yellow swim brief punctuated by the brand’s familiar metal monogram at the hip.
The collaboration debuted at The Standard, Ibiza, where Lopez hosted an intimate rooftop dinner, while a month-long boutique takeover brings Luar’s wider poolside universe to the hotel. “I guess I’m finally getting my summer,” he says.
It’s defiantly optimistic. As September draws to a close and attention turns toward coats and knitwear, Lopez is thinking about bare skin, salt water, and disappearing somewhere with very little on the agenda.
(The closing parties in Ibiza rage on, anyway.) His ideal summer, he says, is “somewhere beautiful, a little sun, good music, good food, people I actually like, and no schedule.” Add sunglasses (double-lensed is the Luar way, of course), a structured signature bag, and “a good drink” to the equation. “Where am I disappearing to?
Anywhere with water, preferably somewhere I can be slightly unreachable.”
For Lopez, stripping back the amount of clothing doesn’t mean scrimping on the style. “I’ve always thought getting dressed for the beach is still getting dressed,” he says.
“Just because you’re wearing less doesn’t mean you should have less point of view.” That philosophy is perhaps especially apt for a designer whose work has always found energy in people dressing to be noticed. Luar’s visual language was forged between Lopez’s Dominican heritage and New York’s underground nightlife, the latter informing the label’s understanding of performance, self-invention, and being seen.
Swimwear, it turns out, isn’t so far removed.
“I think the beach and nightlife have more in common than people realize,” Lopez says. “They’re both places where people are getting ready to be seen.” A swimsuit carries its own particular vulnerability: “There’s nowhere to hide. But I also think that can be incredibly powerful. You’re saying, this is my body, this is how I’m presenting myself, and I’m comfortable being seen.”
The references have been accumulated over time: Dominican beaches, New York summers, old photographs, Christopher Street nightlife, and “the feeling of being somewhere where everybody is watching everybody.” Ibiza contributes its own particular fantasy. “There’s still this feeling of freedom, performance, fantasy and escape.”
Making swimwear also presented Lopez with a new technical proposition. “You’re dealing with the body in a completely different way, and the garment has to move, hold, and function while still looking beautiful,” he says. His answer was to take the most familiar of beach garments and introduce just enough friction. Some briefs resemble classic Speedos, interrupted by a metal L sitting at the hip. “It’s a very simple detail, but it changes everything.”
The aim, as ever, is recognizability without predictability. “Even when we’re doing something as simple as a swimsuit, I still want there to be that little what the fuck is that? moment.”
And Ibiza provides an appropriately uninhibited first setting. For Lopez, the island’s appeal is not so much in its Dionysian reputation for excess as in the permission it gives visitors to reshape themselves temporarily.
“You can be dressed up, half naked, dancing all day, dancing all night, swimming at 6 p.m., going somewhere at midnight that you didn’t even know existed that morning,” he says. “There’s something very seductive about that kind of freedom.”
As Lopez puts it, the best, equal parts glamorous and chaotic nights reach their climax when they “completely get away from you.” The glamorous part is easy when you’re dressing for Luar’s world. “The chaotic part is usually what makes it memorable.”