The California-born Louie, 39, launched Aubero in 2022. The label has been selected as a semifinalist at this year’s LVMH Prize, one of the four American labels to make the list. This is the designer’s second run with a label of his own, having first launched an eponymous collection, Julian Louie, in 2009 to acclaim in the New York scene—New York magazine crowned him the “new prince of fashion” following his debut collection. Louie has over a decade of experience working for other brands under his belt. He studied architecture at The Cooper Union, but internships at Imitation of Christ and Calvin Klein led to a career in fashion. When at the latter, then designer Francisco Costa took Louie under his wing, selecting him for Vogue Italia’s “Protégé Project.” After his time at there and designing his first label, Louie moved on to work as a design director at J. Mendel and most recently as a womenswear design consultant at Amiri.
The name Aubero is a riff of Oberon, the king of fairies in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (The label was named Oberon initially, though Louie changed it for trademark purposes.) Louie wanted to be an actor when he was younger, a fantasy that began when he saw a performance of the same play in his hometown. His menswear proposal with Aubero is certainly playful and theatrical, but it’s rooted in an everyday pragmatism that makes it all the more compelling. His intricate and sophisticated material exploration driven by vintage and repurposed fabrics is offset by the familiarity and simplicity of his silhouettes. The approach, in a way, is preservationist: An antique chiffon skirt has been carefully taken apart and transformed into a new garment encased in a pair of casual shorts; and a delicate sequin embroidery reminiscent of the 1920s, found partially shredded, is on display on a jacket. As Louie’s pieces are worn, the delicate materials he’s put in his garments-as-vitrines will continue to age and take on new shapes.
“You can keep the integrity of this really fragile textile and turn it into something that is legible and wearable,” said Louie, “there’s an immediacy, otherwise it’s an art project, which I’m not interested in.” The idea is not to destroy vintage pieces or erase their history, but to preserve it.