LUAR Fall Winter 2025 collection, El Pato, carries a history that exists beyond fabric and design. It speaks through gestures, hands moving in ways that once invited mockery, motions that told their own stories. Flamboyant, precise, unmistakable. Just like the clothes he wore. Just like Simón. Simón, the one everyone whispered about, the name turned into a slur before it ever had a chance to be a person.
He became the reference, the example, the one who represented a whole generation of Mira ese pato. A phrase spoken with amusement, sometimes contempt. It was said with knowing looks, tossed out in passing, a judgment and a warning wrapped in the same breath. The weight of it lingered, hanging in the air long after the words were gone.
The ones who spoke it often carried their own contradictions. Doña en gracia, for instance. She had no real grace, but she flung stale bread from her window with all the confidence of someone who believed she did. The bread fell, disregarded, as people walked by, as though it was nothing. She never looked back. En gracia.
Maybe she wasn’t sure of herself either, but she was graciosa, funny, in her own way. There was a kind of defiance in her carelessness. A disregard so complete it almost became its own kind of power.
And then, the comparisons. The murmurs. The ones that came before the realization settled in. Bendito, mira el hijo de Super, se parece a Simón. A voice from somewhere close, but not close enough to stop it. The reflex was immediate, Leave me alone. I’m no maricón. The rejection came instinctively, an attempt to shove the association aside before it could stick.
But the reflection was always there, waiting. Every time, like a mirror forcing itself into view. The image was inescapable. At first, it felt like something to run from. Then, over time, came the understanding, the real maricón wasn’t the one in the reflection. It was the one who spent years fearing what they saw.
LUAR’s El Pato doesn’t just revisit that past, it makes it visible. It turns what was once ridiculed into something undeniable.
