Their Excellent Adventure

After founding and running Proenza Schouler for 23 years in New York, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez have packed up house and moved to Loewe. Maya Singer walks and talks with them as they prepare their debut in a global fashion landscape that's radically changing. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

- 

HOT DESKING McCollough (FAR LEFT) and Hernandez settle in at the Loewe offices. Sittings Editor: Jack Borkett.

Is it possible to be in love with a leather swatch? I wouldn't have thought so, but on this hot June day in Paris, Lazaro Hernandez is gazing at one with such ardor, I’m revisiting the assumption. “It looks painted, right? Like watercolor—or Rothko, the way the colors bleed into each other.... But it’s not, look, it’s layers of leather—the technique’s old, it’s called skiving, but this is a new way of doing it....” Hernandez carries on in this vein, like a friend breathlessly reporting back on a fantastic first date. Meanwhile, Jack McCollough, Hernandez’s partner in work and life, is road testing a bucket bag in the mirror (“How’s this slouch?”) as members of the Loewe design team look on.

In January, Hernandez and McCollough announced that they were stepping down from Proenza Schouler, the brand they had started 23 years earlier as students at Parsons School of Design. In April, they packed up the New York City life that was, as adults, effectively all they had known and boarded a flight to Paris to become the new creative directors of Loewe. The day I meet them at the house's Paris headquarters near Place Vendôme, their worldly possessions are in boxes, their home a short-term sublet in the 7th—they haven't had much time to look for, as McCollough says, their “real place,” as taking the creative reins of an international luxury house is a fairly all-encompassing task. Not only must you set a course for the brand’s future, you must also learn your way around the office. To wit, Hernandez, giving me a tour: “Wait—there’s a kitchen on this floor?”

Hernandez and McCollough are two designers among many getting the lay of the land at their new, or newish, gigs.