San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Designer duo Proenza Schouler talks art, tech and the Bay Area customer in rare S.F. visit.
Proenza Schouler: Buzzy design duo makes rare visit
Talking with Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, the designers behind New York womenswear brand Proenza Schouler, is like a conversation with cool, artsy friends from out of town: They’re looking forward to a weekend in Big Sur, and share recommendations for land art — which, to be clear, is different from Burning Man art.
Sipping red wine in the dining room of the private San Francisco club the Battery on Friday evening, and dressed mostly in black, the duo is unassuming yet elegant, charming while not the least bit aloof, despite exhaustion from a party the day before to promote their first fragrance, Arizona — in Milan, Italy.
For the past 16 years, their faces have been mainstays in Vogue (editor-in-chief Anna Wintour is “like a godmother”), and they’re considered a prestigious show to see at New York Fashion Week. They won the first CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund award in 2004, and their foray into handbags with the PS1 in 2008 became an instant hit. Once the new kids on the block, they have become an American stalwart.
In San Francisco, their reach is perhaps less visible, and this is a rare visit to meet a growing roster of clients who respond to their art-world influences and contemporary aesthetic. Their last visit was in 2010 — the same year that Instagram was created — and a lot has changed in fashion and in San Francisco.
In the morning, McCollough and Hernandez met with the sales team at Saks, whom Hernandez thinks of as the “secret weapon” to sales. “They are the ones communicating with clients, and when they hear from the designer about the work, they feel closer to the work and are able to speak about it, so it’s really helpful in that way,” he says.
There, they learn that the San Francisco woman is averse to logos and outward branding. “They are a lot more subtle. The people with that kind of expendable income tend to be a little more discreet, which we love,” McCollough says.
They are curious about the “motherland of tech”: “What is the tech culture like?” “Is there a cross-pollination between fashion and tech here?” “Do a lot of people use Apple Watch?”
“There is something in the air here,” McCollough says. “It starts revolutions — in the ’60s the hippies, then gay rights and now the tech thing.” Even the casual thing, he points out, “is ‘fashion’ now too, right?”
Later, they will attend an intimate cocktail party at the Cow Hollow home of art adviser Sabrina Buell, who co-hosted the event with Future Justice Fund President Kaitlyn Krieger (who founded the grantmaking organization with her husband, Mike Krieger, after selling Instagram). Both women are known for their art collections, which resonated with the designers’ ethos.
“Proenza Schouler is art,” says stylist Mary Gonsalves Kinney, who co-hosted the event. “Each collection invokes a genre or a feeling that Jack and Lazaro connect with that season, which makes it easy for the San Francisco woman to connect with.”
Gonsalves Kinney dressed Kaitlyn Krieger in a black and white Proenza Schouler gown for the Met Gala in May, and her clients were among those toasting to the designers.
In a statement afterward, the designers reported back: “The San Francisco woman is a true fashion customer, and we learned that the brand really resonates with our clients there. She appreciates the influence of art and design, as both aspects are influential to the culture of the city itself. We met with incredible women in the art, design, finance and tech worlds, and it is amazing to see them balance and embrace the practicality of the clothes with the heightened design of our pieces.”
Events such as the cocktail party are emblematic of the constantly evolving, global arena in which fashion designers continue to innovate how they reach customers — without forsaking the personal touch. In addition to the new fragrance, Proenza Schouler has recently hired new chief executive officer Judd Crane, launched sister brand PSWL and showed its 2018 collections during the couture shows in Paris.
“We got a little stir-crazy in New York for that long,” Hernandez explains. The Paris experiment was a chance to get in front of a new customer, work closely with L’Oreal on the development of Arizona and go “off the grid” for a bit.
Showing during “the Holy Week” of fashion among Dior and Chanel was intense and scary, but a good challenge, says Hernandez. “Everything these days is so fluid. Just because you’re a New York designer doesn’t mean you have to show in New York.”
Adds McCollough, “It’s nice to make little changes to keep ourselves interested and keep it new and fresh.” (Amazingly, they truly do seem to speak in sync and onmessage.) But a year was enough, and they have since returned to New York.
Although they are known for a close connection with artists, they face the same relentless pace that plagues most designers, which means they have to be inspired at very specific times of the season. “It’s the most beautiful part of the job, but sadly, it’s 5 percent of the year, really,” Hernandez says. Still, most of their design work is done at a home in the Berkshires, and they have tried to resist the pull of increasing connectivity.
Hernandez allows that “it would be nice to take a moment to just take a moment. I think a lot of people dream of having their own business, but that comes with a lot of other responsibility. Going back to tech, people are bombarded with information — you are constantly on email and expected to respond to someone within the hour.”
And yet, after 12 years, being a designer feels the same, Hernandez says with a laugh. “You don’t ever feel like you’ve made it. It’s always a challenge, but that’s what keeps it interesting, too. The industry is never staying still, and you evolve with the times. We look ahead at what is the next problem we have to fix, the next target, the next goal, the next shoe — always looking ahead, ahead, ahead.”
So maybe in retirement they can take more time to, you know, design?
They laugh. “That’s the last thing I want to do when I retire,” Hernandez says.