No Desert Mirage

It’s a bright, sunny morning in Julian Louie’s New York apartment, and the first thing my eye settles on over the fashion designer’s shoulder is a bust of Nefertiti. It turns out the piece once belonged to his grandmother, a children’s book author, and sat pride of place in the Connecticut home she shared with his grandfather—an artist and architect who made his own, abstracted response in ceramic to the bust, which is on display in the next room. “So there’s a pair,” he says, smiling in a lavender check shirt and mismatched earrings. “One day they’ll live together, but right now they’re separated.”

‍

Louie’s blend of the historical and the highly sentimental with a touch of whimsy has become his calling card over the past two years, as his label Aubero has grown rapidly from a dream conceived during a lengthy stay in the desert near Tucson, Arizona. Sifting through fabric remnants in the basement of the original Desert Vintage, one of New York’s buzziest—and 2024 LVMH Prize-shortlisted—brands was born. “It really started with an exploratory mindset, and that informs everything to this day,” the designer, 40, says of his outlook. His pieces take shape out of deadstock and vintage fabrics that form wildly intricate, richly patterned, and highly desirable riffs on menswear staples. Owing to this process and the materials, each item is effectively one of a kind.

‍

An equally key element of the Aubero narrative is Louie’s deep geographical ties: to the Santa Cruz, California locale of his childhood, to those awe-inspiring Arizona landscapes, to the subcultures and febrile energy of New York City. He moved to the latter in 2002 to study architecture at Cooper Union before going on to work with labels J. Mendel and Amiri and even had a stint running a brand under his own name in the late 2000s. “I find that there’s an incredible luxury in the expansiveness of a horizon, or the intricacy of a rock, all of these things,” he says, before adding with a laugh: “I can sound a little off-the-planet when I talk about this.”

The operative word for Aubero, which Louie returns to multiple times, is “grounded,” whether in the sense of place threaded through every garment, or the tactile nature of its mysterious ties to the past, or the deliberately slow and steady scaling of the brand with its select retail presence in primarily independent, local stores. It’s this that has fostered the loyal community that returns to buy the designer’s sartorial wonders season after season. “When I think about the customer, it’s about a value system,” Louie says. “It’s not about a demographic, or a specific character, but finding people with shared values—about material, about craft, about quality, even about certain colors.”

‍

On the immediate radar for Louie, however? A well-earned vacation on the Greek island of Patmos. Still, it’s about the journey, not the destination. “There are always going to be limitations of scale when working with material that’s finite, and it does come with its challenges,” he admits. “But to grow it in a responsible way is super important to me. It has to keep that sense of intimacy.”