Last season, Beyoncé graced the front row of Luar’s FW24 show—surprising even the designer, Raul Lopez, himself. Now, as NYFW rolls back around, Lopez followed up his Decepcionista collection—which nodded to metrosexual beauty—with another take on queer subcultures. But, this time, calling all drag, punk, and trade to the front for a show playfully doused in shade titled En Boca Quedó.
As almost a chopped and screwed version of their SS24 hair, hairstylist Evanie Frausto revived intense and graphic techniques to set the look. “[It’s this] glassy, sleek-finished look and we’re pairing these crazy sculptures with pieces we handmade at my studio,” Frausto— who cut and painted on stiff, curved pieces of hair with layers of glue-like gel before blowing them dry— tells ESSENCE. Meanwhile, as a former MAC makeup pro, “Raul has a strong sense of what he wants the beauty to give,” he says.
“From drag to even punk, which, sometimes we don’t think of punk as a queer subculture, we alluded to a few of those cultures,” makeup artist Yadim adds. Pulling spare fabrics and other bits and bobs into the makeup, “we’re actually using material we borrowed from the collection.” Covering the brows with glue sticks then concealing them, he turned the collection’s vinyl python material into eyebrows for a few of the looks. But, that’s not even the most dramatic part.
Using a digital file from the collection as a stencil, Yadim used a distorted leopard print to skate more into drag. “We printed [the leopard print] onto tattoo transfer paper and then we’re laying that on the eye as eyeshadow,” he says. To outline the look, his team used MAC Paintstick in pure white on the lids and enlarged the eyes with Eye Kohl and curled faux lashes on the top, and mod-inspired lashes on the bottom.
Nail artist Naomi Yasuda solidified the glam with four different nail looks: cheetah print, ‘90s-inspired, copper, and metallic. Similar to the makeup, which turned leftover, makeshift decals into a statement, “I found these beaded decals in the Luar studio and we decided to put them on the nails too,” she says. She dangled the rags to riches transformation from the models’s fingertips.
