This isn’t Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s first Paris rodeo. Before the pandemic, the Proenza Schouler duo had a two-season stint in the City of Light. It was a move made in effort to enhance sales and increase their international visibility, I wrote at the time, leaving unspoken the elephant in the room that was their big ambition to land a design job at a French heritage brand.
Now, they’ve done it. They were named the new creative directors of Loewe, replacing Jonathan Anderson, in March. A couple of months earlier they had announced they were stepping away from the label they founded in New York almost 25 years ago, freeing themselves up to take the Loewe post. That’s a monumental decision as far as life choices go, but Hernandez and McCollough did so with extreme enthusiasm, primed and ready for a new chapter. It’s been six months since they landed in Paris and they were nothing but smiles at a visit to their Rue Scribe headquarters, which was buzzing with controlled energy 24 hours before their show.
“It’s been so fun,” Hernandez said, “I don’t even know how to talk about it: being able to unleash the thing inside of us, no restrictions, just being able to play and experiment. We’re so happy, and I think it comes across.” That it did. In a custom-built space behind the Université de Paris in the 14th arrondissement this morning, McCollough and Hernandez’s Loewe was alive with a sportif sensibility true to their New York-bred fashion roots.
In fact, they said their pillars for the brand are Spanishness, craft, and that “it has to look like us.” Loewe is the second-oldest luxury brand in the world after Hermès, having been established in 1846 in Madrid. As a leather house, craft is in its marrow, a distinction their predecessor emphasized with the establishment of the annual Craft Prize. But now it’s Jack and Lazaro’s turn. By way of introduction, they had Ellsworth Kelly’s Yellow Panel With Red Curve, on loan from a collector friend, installed at the entrance to the venue.
Its sunny colors were well represented in a collection that spanned glossy heat-sealed leather jackets sculpted like bells and draped multi-layer scarf dresses, their seam allowances creating a cascade of ruffles. These were shown alongside sportswear archetypes—jeans, button-downs, T-shirts, and windbreakers—“twisted,” as McCollough said, “throught the filter of high craft.” The jeans, for example? Shredded leather. The button-downs: leather too, hand-pleated and spray-painted. And the tanks and tees: leather “yarn” shot through with wire to create their crinkly shapes. Other experiments were more high-tech, like the towel dresses made from 3-D printed “fabric” with the pile of velvet and the windbreaker from what they described as a first-of-its-kind silk gore-tex.
The season’s key bag shape is a one-handle Amazona in suede, leather, or croc, big enough for a laptop but with a slouchy, running-for-the-subway feeling. You can take the boys out of New York, but you can’t take the New York out of the boys. The verve they brought to their debut just may be the new Loewe’s greatest selling point.
