It was around 2014, 2015, when the world began to hear about a young man named Maluma, a Colombian boy who made catchy songs that began to travel the world.
In just over five years, Juan Luis Londoño (his real name) has become one of the best-known musicians in the world, thanks to his songs but also his controversies, his lyrics on the edge of machismo or his extravagant whims.
At 27 years old, Maluma - whose name is made up of the first syllable of the names of his parents, Marlli and Luis, and of his sister, Manuela - comes from a middle-class family in Medellín, Colombia, but in recent years he has amassed a great fortune thanks to his businesses and his music.
According to the American edition of the magazine
¡Hola!
, in April 2020 it owned 20 million dollars, almost 17 million euros.
According to the specialized media
Forbes
, which in 2019 included him in his list of 30 outstanding characters under 30 years of age, the musician earns just over 420,000 euros for each of his concerts and charges about 45,000 for each one.
In addition, he achieves monthly profits of more than 70,000 euros for his YouTube channel.
Not bad for the child who began selling sweets and sandwiches in the schoolyard among his classmates, as his documentary
What was, what I am
, what I will be
, released in June 2019,
collected on YouTube
, and has come to rise as a Grammy Award winner.
Now
Papi Juancho,
as Maluma is known in recent times, takes another step in his professional life by launching a collaboration with the French fashion firm Balmain.
Its designer, Olivier Rousteing, has said that the idea of making brightly colored garments, with neon-printed signs, came to him during confinement, when he was re-watching his favorite shows from the eighties and nineties.
“My friend Maluma quickly realized that the new laid-back Miami look, with pastel hues and bold prints, was a perfect fit for his unique style and addictive rhythms.
After being photographed giving a Caribbean touch to a classic French print, Maluma started collaborating with me to create his look for the MTV Video Music Awards, ”he recalls.
“After its success we knew we had to take the collaboration further.
So we started working on a line of designs for his tour ”, he says.
"The pandemic forced to change the dates," he recalls, and that encouraged them to launch the garments created as "a special and limited collection", where there are sneakers, shirts and sweatshirts, and which was released on April 12.
All this accompanied by a list of songs created by both.
"Neither Maluma nor I", says Rousteing, "would be able to conceive fashion without the help of music."
Maluma, in a moment of the collaboration of the fashion collection for the Parisian house Balmain.Phraa / EFE
Maluma says in the statement released by the brand that he believes that his path and that of Rousteing run parallel because they both try to "change the rules of the game every time they play", and that this collaboration is "a mixture of cultures."
“One of my goals was to work and make a collection with a respected fashion house, but this trip has been even more exciting, because Olivier has pushed me to design with him and create looks that I will wear on stage and that combine haute couture. with Papi Juancho ”, he affirms.
"The process was exciting as I always dreamed it would one day, and I have been happy that a friend like Olivier let me express my creativity through fashion."
This is not the first time Maluma has made a foray into the fashion industry.
In 2015 he launched a line of clothing designed by himself, made in Colombia at affordable prices and that could be obtained both
online
and in a chain of stores in his country that had more than 200 points of sale.
Then he told various Colombian media that he was “a fashion fanatic” and that he was involved with design to a certain extent: “I don't know how to draw it [...] I'm just saying what design I like, what fabrics to use and what color to put on one garment or another.
I did not study fashion design, but that does not prevent me from getting very involved in making clothes ”.
Maluma, with one of the designs created with Balmain.
Then, by 2015, it was when the singer's media explosion arrived.
Londoño combined that business with another that also brought him fame, popularity and income: being a judge on the
La Voz Kids program
.
Something that ended up launching him to stardom in his country and in the rest of Latin America, where he had already toured the previous year.
It was also in 2015 that he received his first Latin Grammy nomination.
It was from there that the singer's public relevance began to be what it is today.
Their standard of living rose and so did their public commitment.
That is why in 2016 he created a foundation, called El Arte de los Sueños, where they provide artistic and musical training to adolescents in vulnerable situations in the Colombian region of Antioquia.
Something that is not incompatible with draft whims like a private plane, which premiered two years ago and which made him emotional to tears.
Although not much is known about the investments and businesses of the Londoños, the singer has had to go out to deny one in which they were not involved: drug trafficking. He denied it earlier this year on his colleague Nicky Jam's podcast. “People thought that we were drug traffickers in my family and that drug trafficking had supported my musical career. Obvious all this, being a lie, but many things are speculated and talked about ”, he explained. His businesses, he says, are legal, and have made him own a
private
jet
, a car collection, a mansion in Colombia and another house in Miami before he turned 30.