“I’ve always loved makeup,” Luar founder Raul Lopez tells MAC’s global creative director Drew Elliott on a Zoom call. In front of an exclusive crowd of editors, Elliott pulls out a black, faux ostrich-textured bag with MAC and Luar inscribed on opposite sides, giving a sneak peek into the collaboration a week ahead of the Fall/Winter 2025 show.
Unlike the classic Ana bag which has a limited opening, the MAC x Luar Ana Artistry Bag cracks wide open, exposing a brush belt tucked and sewn inside. “I started as a cashier,” Lopez says, working at the Herald Square MAC beauty counter over 20 years ago. “I used to take the [store’s] brush belt and wear it on my clothing after work to give the silhouette of a skirt.”
While MAC has been the beauty sponsor behind most of the Luar shows, including his latest called “El Pato” (meaning “duck” in Spanish and used as a homophobic slur), their bird-like makeup bag is a reflection of the theatrical beauty looks we saw throughout the show.
It’s not generation, culture, race or nationality that brought MAC’s director of makeup artistry Terry Barber and Raul Lopez together. Instead, “we were both club kids who got adopted by the underground queer scene,” Barber says. Using the feathered slur to recall ‘80s and ‘90s drag queens, which Lopez says have since turned into “clones”, the show’s makeup is an extension of the Stonewall riots.
The look is “late ‘80s supermodel meets stonewall era drag,” the makeup artist says. When asked about the products he used: “Everything but the kitchen sink,” he smirks. Having been at MAC since 1993, Barber slapped on three eyeshadows that were in the line when he started—Gesso, Scene, and Print—as if done in the back of a New York taxi cab.
Then, to juxtapose the power brow bone, he channeled the supermodel technique of using a brow pencil for a deliberately overdrawn, skinny lip line. Using the new MAC Nudes Collection, which includes popular ‘90s shades like Fleshpot, the lips referenced supermodels like Joan Small, who closed the show.
Unlike Barber, hair stylist Jawara Wauchope is a long-time friend of Lopez. “I grew up with Raul, so we’re watching each other grow together,” Wauchope says. “We have our own language, so the creative call is very different from the normal creative call,” he laughs. “I understand his references and I feel like we live similar.”
Drawing from an era which existed even before their friendship, however, “the inspiration was from the Latina women of the ‘80s who used to wear their hair up and pushed around with gel.” Using TRESemmé Extra Hold Gel, the hair was slicked into a ponytail, twisted then pinned into a bun before adding fanned out hair pieces which resembled a mating bird.
As the most literal interpretation of “El Pato”, “I think of nails as part of the collection,” nail artist Naomi Yasuda says. Known for her avant garde manicures (last season, she fixed makeshift decals laying around the Luar studio onto the nails), Yasuda sourced four feather colors—black and white, black, white, and brown—which matched the base of three-inch long nails.
“It was really hard to glue them on,” she says, using OPI No Wipe Top Coat as feather adhesive before curing. “I did two coats [of gel paint], let it dry, stuck the crystal first, then put the feather in the gel, and added more crystals on top.” Gripping onto the MAC x Luar Ana Artistry Bag, the look comes full circle on the catwalk.
“It’s time to bring back [the ‘80s drag] era of fashion,” Raul Lopez says. “I’m definitely one of the girls who have been pioneering this again, and just pushing it back into people’s faces.”