NEW YORK — The rumors started shortly after sunset Tuesday, making their way through New York Fashion Week’s evening events: Beyoncé was attending the Luar show.
It seemed too juicy to be true. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter is the world’s most famous and elusive pop star, a figure who rarely appears in public and who is riding the high of a Super Bowl announcement that she is releasing a new (country?) album, “Act II.” She attended Pharrell Williams’s Louis Vuitton debut last summer, but her husband, Jay-Z, performed at the show, and Williams is a longtime friend.
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Besides, brands at the Louis Vuitton scale — it is one of the crown jewels of LVMH, the world’s biggest fashion conglomerate — have entire departments, not to mention enormous budgets, dedicated to wrangling celebrities. Stars in the front row are part of the publicity machine that keeps luxury brands, whose products and logos are increasingly hard to tell apart, in the news.
Luar, by contrast, is a New York indie brand with a cult following that celebrates the women of designer Raul Lopez’s Dominican American upbringing and the eccentricities of the queer underground. Launched by Lopez in 2011 after he left Hood By Air, another disruptive New York brand he co-founded, it has gone on hiatus multiple times, returning to Fashion Week in the fall of 2021 and becoming a marquee event among New York demi-celebrities for whom partying is performance art (such as actress Julia Fox and voguing extraordinaire Honey Balenciaga).
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Like Telfar Clemens, who launched Telfar, the brand that spent a decade making anti-fashion and then found outrageous success through its signature shopping bag, Lopez is a hometown hero, a self-made fashion star who floats adjacent to the luxury industrial complex (which frequently takes cues from him). He embraces fashion as a tool for self-mythology and making outrageous pronouncements — “this collection is premium trash,” “the metrosexual is back,” “we are in the era of the stray,” which is a portmanteau for “straight gay,” or a straight man who dresses with the finesse of a queer one. Last season, he designed looks with yanked-back collars, imagining a partyer being pulled from the Hades of nightclubbing by a street preacher in his family’s neighborhood in the Dominican Republic.
Since he returned to the fashion calendar in 2021, Lopez has found stability through the creation of an “it bag,” the round-handled Ana, and his line is carried at Bergdorf Goodman and Nordstrom. But he does not have the budget to pay celebrities to wear his clothes or sit in his front row — and indeed, a representative for Luar confirmed that none of the Knowleses or Knowles-Carter were paid to attend the show.
By 8 p.m. Tuesday, an hour before the show, the rumors began to seem more credible: Julez Smith, the son of Beyoncé’s sister, Solange Knowles, was modeling. Someone saw Beyoncé at dinner uptown; someone else heard she was taking pictures in the Bushwick warehouse where the show was taking place.
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Shortly after 9:30 — fashion shows usually begin about 40 minutes after their stated start time — Solange walked in and sat down in the front row next to designer Christopher John Rogers. A few minutes later, the crowd fell nearly silent and Beyoncé entered through a back door, wearing a silver-sequined Gaurav Gupta jacket and matching boots with a cowboy hat, and a hologram Ana bag. Her mother, Tina Knowles, was right behind her, in a Luar coat, an Ana bag in her hand.
After a moment of disbelief — was Beyoncé really here in this tiny warehouse?! — mania erupted. Photographers and show attendees swarmed her. “This is everything,” exclaimed Mel Ottenberg, the editor of Interview. Honey Balenciaga, who danced in Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour this past fall, rushed over to say hello.
A celebrity’s endorsem*nt of a fashion brand rarely has meaning these days. Although a handful of actors or musicians see fashion as self-expression or a visual addendum to their artistic output, most use it as a supplement to their income from acting or performing. A star can earn upward of $200,000 for wearing a brand’s designs to an awards show, for example, and endorsem*nt deals, in which a celebrity is a “face” of the brand who wears its designs regularly and poses in campaigns, can garner a star more than a million dollars.
Beyoncé’s front-row appearance was the rare moment of genuine fashion curiosity from a star whose co-sign can change a designer, dancer or musician’s life.
A few minutes after the photo frenzy, the lights went down and the show began. Although the collection was created months before Lopez knew Beyoncé would be in attendance, it had an urgent assurance. If Lopez has a signature, it is not his big shoulders, though he certainly owns that. Really, it is his ability to take the trappings of bourgeois ladyhood — fur, skirt suits, manicures — and of machismo manhood, like watches and big shoulders, and reform them in his wholly original eye.
Here, there was Dior’s New Look — the WASP-waisted jacket and full skirt that reinvigorated fashion and Parisian culture after World War II — as well as the kinds of baggy, richly patterned V-neck sweaters Armenian American uncles wear to gossip over coffee, but intercut with leather panels and worn over leather leggings; and a very uptown-doyenne, Carolina Herrera combo of ball skirt and cardigan, but the skirt was embossed ostrich and the cardigan’s shoulders pitched high like a matriarch in her too-big shoulder pads at the family reunion.
Lopez’s clothes are designed to be viewed with eyes bulging and jaw dropped. Their beauty and intelligence is that Lopez manages to make the fantasy and ephemerality of ballroom culture permanent through his tricks of construction — the kinds of homespun things that drag queens do with scissors and a dream, like camp takes on runway tropes and old Vogue spreads, he does in his New York atelier.
Tucked into the show was a collaboration with Moose Knuckles, the luxury outerwear line that has also worked with Telfar and Eckhaus Latta — a sign that Lopez’s star is rising. Luar also announced the introduction of a line of basics, including sweater dresses and sweats, that will be available each season.
All the while, Beyoncé sat with a relaxed, closed-lip smile, nodding her head to a wacky soundtrack and pointing out a few choice looks to her mother. Lopez was a finalist for the LVMH Prize last year, and has been a nominee and winner at the CFDA Awards — known as the Oscars of fashion — multiple times in the past two years. But the appearance of Beyoncé, expressing seemingly organic fandom, is the sort of approval that will propel him to another stratosphere.
