Bridget Foley’s Diary Proenza Schouler: Forging the Future

One day, you’re the next-new-thing toast of fashion. Then, in a dizzying blur, you’re fighting to secure your company’s future. Time can be a bitch. Not that you’ll hear any complaints from Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, often referred to as “the Proenza Boys,” though at 41, they’ve long since outgrown any common-usage claim to “boy” status — except in the looks category. Both retain ample measure of the central-casting assets that provided fine, photogenic accompaniment to their indisputable talent when they burst into fashion awareness in 2002. They were straight out of Parsons, adorable, complementary bookends with a thesis collection powerful enough to lure Barneys New York to see, shop and buy, a golden moment in the infancy of their business. (The designers look back on that moment wistfully, for obvious reasons.) Leapfrog 17 years — over the compelling run during which they won three CFDA Womenswear Designer of the Year Awards; launched an “It” bag, and decamped to Paris, where they worked their antiminimal modernism by escalating their work’s craft quotient, and their prices, too, the latter eventually beyond reason. Meanwhile, they opened and closed a store on Madison Avenue, a lingering recession took its toll, tech changed

Follow WWD on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.

Read More...

from WWDWWD https://ift.tt/2DCsPgc