Proenza Schouler Bows Out of Paris Couture Week
HOMECOMING: Paris Couture Week will be sans Proenza Schouler, the brand has confirmed, with plans for the upcoming collection to be revealed in the near future.
As reported like countless others across the industry, the brand’s founders, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, are facing essential fork-in-the-road questions, including how to continue to develop their business and whether to re-embrace New York as part of a small collective of cool-reputation designers who would show on a December-to-June schedule.
The designers have always kept an open mind about where they are showing.
Following their debut runway presentation in Paris in July 2017, after spending their entire careers in New York, McCollough described moving cities as a “bittersweet” decision. Hernandez was less nostalgic, citing a “time of fluidity in general in the world,” and describing preconceptions that “if you’re an American designer you have to show in New York” as archaic.
“I remember, like, Tom Ford telling us a long time ago, ‘Get out of New York. Try something else and then come back.’ We’re showing in Paris right now, but maybe it’s not forever. For us, we have no, sort of, long-term plans on that level. Like, we might do that for a couple of seasons and come back. Who knows,” he said.
Their fall 2018 collection, presented during Paris Couture Week in January, was based on a compilation of the brand’s greatest hits. Hernandez backstage described it as: “A little bit of this, a little bit of that. A little bit of West Coast, a little bit of East, a little bit of New York showing in Paris.”
Meanwhile, Rodarte, which defected to Paris Couture Week in the same season as Proenza Schouler, remains a guest member of the official couture calendar.
The couture collections will take place from July 1 to July 5.
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