The spring 2025 Luar show took place outdoors at Rockefeller Plaza. To set the proper mood, the back part of two cars filled with chucheros flanked the runway on either end. A chuchero is a box that contains multiple speakers, subwoofers, and other equipment that turn cars into heart-attack inducing sound machines. In the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, this “sport” is known as voceteo. The proof that they were legit is the amount of editors that jumped out of their seats when the first sounds pumped through the speakers. The music, a melange of techno, booming bass, and maybe even a Nine Inch Nails sample, didn’t let up one second during the whole show.
The chucheros made sense both as a tie to his designer Raul López’s Dominican roots, but also as a modern iteration of punk attitudes. (What’s more punk than blasting your music at ungodly volumes to stake a claim for your own self-made culture?) The starting point for this collection was the designer’s life during the late ’90s and early aughts when he was still a teenager trying to square his life at home in Brooklyn with his Dominican family and friends with the world he was encountering when he would venture to the Lower East Side to hang out. “I was all teen angst and trying to figure out who I was, hanging out with the punk girls, the crazy girls, and the art girls downtown but I was still dressing like my family wanted to,” he explained a day before the show at his Wall Street studio. “I needed to have a skinny pant to hang with the girls, but then I could wear a button up to be with my family… my hair could have a nice little bang.” You know, the asymmetric kind we all wore back then. “I was in my punk era, being rebellious.”
Although López referenced New York Dolls and CBGB’s and the traditional NYC punk scene that we’re all familiar with, this was not a carbon copy homage with mohawks, studs, and safety pins. “Punk is a feeling, it’s an attitude, it’s how you present yourself out of the norm and stand out and be you,” he said.