Thursday, June 26, 2025

BEAUTY: Clothing--Aubero

Founded just three years ago in 2022, Julian Louie's brand Aubero has quickly found success in Paris. Hailing from right here in Northern California (local boy from Santa Cruz!), Louie was the sole American finalist in the 2024 edition of the LVMH Prize and is currently a semifinalist for the 2025 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund.

He is dedicated to using antique textiles, scraps, and pieces left over from past collections to create his garments. I love the handmade sense of these pieces and indeed, many of them are one-of-a-kind...quilted, stitched, collaged and assembled, with fraying edges or pieces too frayed to stand on their own stitched under mesh. Louie says this reverence for fabric comes from his paternal grandparents who emigrated from China to the US where they ran a laundry on Long Island. "It’s this inheritance of care for clothing and building a life around the caring and mending of it," said Louie. He couples that with memories of Santa Cruz, where he saw surfers changing out of their wetsuits by their trucks after riding waves ("a kind of foggy eroticism" he confesses)...in fact, the skirts/sarongs in this collection directly reference the towels said surfers use to wrap around their waists while changing.

I feel the reverence, and the memories...there is an earnestness and authenticity to Louie and his SS '26 collection. And in a revoltingly commercialized, inauthentic Tik Tok world, I appreciate that.


https://www.instagram.com/aubero__/

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