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 ardour, I’m revisiting the assumption. “It looks painted, right? Like watercolour—or Rothko, the way the colours 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. This year will go down as a historic one in fashion. It’s as if all the dials have suddenly turned, and the biggest names determined, en masse, they were due for a new point of view. The spring 2026 shows in September alone will see a dozen labels with new designers. There will be a few fresh faces, like Michael Rider emerging from behind the scenes to succeed Hedi Slimane at Celine; elsewhere, it’s musical chairs. Matthieu Blazy was beloved at Bottega Veneta before his appointment at Chanel, for example; Hernandez and McCollough’s Loewe predecessor, Jonathan Anderson, has of course moved on to Dior. Rewind a season or two and the drumbeat of change becomes earthquake-level loud: Chemena Kamali at Chloé, Sarah Burton at Givenchy, Haider Ackermann resurrected at Tom Ford—the list goes on, and the list is long.
“These last few seasons in Europe, it’s been palpable. We’re at the end of a cycle,” notes Moda Operandi co-founder Lauren Santo Domingo. “And I kept feeling like Jack and Lazaro should be here—we need new energy, and they’re always pushing forward.” Of all the designers dealt out in fashion’s great reshuffle, Hernandez and McCollough are the only two who have never worked at a luxury house; never seen how the gilded machine operates. The first time they visited the Loewe factory in Getafe, outside Madrid, they were agog. “Some people, they’ve been working there 50 years, the most incredible artisans,” McCollough says. “And these hundreds of people are looking at us, like, okay, what can we make for you?”
“I think it’s going to be wild,” speculates W editor-in-chief and longtime friend Sara Moonves of Hernandez and McCollough’s debut Loewe collection.
“All we’ve ever seen them do is Proenza,” an independent American brand with a tight focus on directional sportswear. “Their creativity, their curiosity, their sophistication as far as materials and technique—where do they go with the Loewe machine behind them?”
Moonves isn’t the only one wondering. We’re all impatient to know what their Loewe will look and feel like—and where it will sit in a transformed fashion landscape. The guesswork strikes me as being about more than clothes and bags and shoes. Even on that front, however, I find little to glean wandering Loewe’s headquarters, where the collections hanging on the press team racks are the last ones Anderson designed. I spot a mood board; it’s vague. The sole clue in view to the future of a Hernandez-and McCollough-led Loewe is that approximately 15cm leather swatch Hernandez rhapsodises over—whisper-thin strips joined together by this new kind of skiving so they appear as one seamless sueded colour-field.
A related clue is a designer named Camille, who Hernandez introduces to me and who spent five years developing the process, working with artisans in Getafe to coax out an intarsia-like effect. “Cool, right?” McCollough says, ambling over. He’s often the more taciturn of the duo. But his eyes tell the tale: he’s in love too.
“It’s always been just us, bouncing off each other—and now, to have someone bringing us a technique they spent five years on…” McCollough trails off, shaking his head in disbelief. “We’ve never had access to anything like this.” I’ll later discover that he and Hernandez have incorporated this skived leather into their debut collection—and that it plays a part in linking their bags, shoes and ready-to-wear together in order to, as Hernandez says, “tell a full story”.
It’s their story, composed in the language of easygoing, all-American sportswear, from parkas and jeans to T-shirts and beyond. But it couldn’t have been written anywhere but here. Hernandez and McCollough hadn’t spent any “serious time” in Paris, confesses McCollough, until they moved to the city to start the Loewe job. Walking around town with them, they gaze everywhere saucer-eyed, like a pair of tourists. Neither speaks French. But in their atelier—at work, in the zone—they seem at home. But also dazzled. Another way to say this is that they seem happy.
Which is another clue. Joy is a wonderful mother to invention and it tends to rub off on the clothes. The mood is very Loewe. “Cerebral, but playful”, is how CEO Pascale Lepoivre summed up the house ethos to me in a chat in which even she admitted that she’s in the dark about where McCollough and Hernandez may go. “If we know everything already, what would be the point?” asked Lepoivre. “The whole point of change is to be surprised.”
Just what, though, are we all waiting for? What do we want—not just from Hernandez and McCollough and Loewe, but from all these new designers, this whole fashion reset—at the end of the day?
“If we know everything already, what would be the point? The whole point of change is to be surprised.”
When I talked to Santo Domingo, she spoke of a sense of limbo pervading fashion—something she felt both as an industry insider and as a shopper scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. “It’s like everyone’s waiting for what’s next, but it’s not here yet.”
What she’s referring to, I believe, is a novel 21st-century experience: the simultaneous torpor and restlessness brought on by a deluge of bland product or content. If you’ve ever spent half an hour flicking through streaming options and then turned off the TV, you know what I mean. So very much on offer—yet, somehow, nothing you want to watch.
Loewe is an exception to this gloomy story, its revenue quadrupling in the decade under Anderson’s stewardship. Which goes to show: people hunger for fashion that doesn’t condescend to them by catering to their familiar tastes. “People need a sense of discovery,” Lepoivre says. And Anderson, in his collections and campaigns, in the brand’s savvy TikToks, in his launch of the annual Loewe Foundation Craft Prize, was always daring you to be interested. Now his admirers are keen to find out if his Loewe legacy is in good hands. Hernandez and McCollough know this, but are determined to tune out the pressure.
“It doesn’t help us,” McCollough points out. “Opposite,” adds Hernandez. “We’re approaching this as the start of a process,” McCollough picks up. “A lot of people are expecting all the big ideas straight out of the box, but even if you look at Jonathan: he didn’t create what Loewe is now overnight. This first season, the important thing is getting the vibe right.”
“And not a made-up vibe,” adds Hernandez. “Like, true to us, but filtered through the codes of the house. Us, but Loewe.” As we’re having this conversation, we’re also wandering through Paris, where so much fashion history has been written. What a vexing time this is for these two American men to be writing themselves into that history. Fashion co-evolves with the world around it and when that world is in a state of gyration, its oscillations have unforeseeable knock-on effects.
Hernandez, McCollough and I came of age in fashion together, and ours has been for the most part an era of spectacle— of ever-increasing hype and hoopla, and outfits optimised for posting, and catwalks merchandised to the hilt—because, business-wise, selling bags in Russia or China or Dubai was the point. It was a globalising era that thrived on instantaneity and virality, and it made sense for brands to chase mass impact.
I submit to you: that era is over—and I’m not just talking about tariffs or nationalism on the rise. I mean little indicators, like Lepoivre mentioning, offhandedly, that Loewe can no longer rely on a few star items becoming worldwide bestsellers. “Before, everywhere it would be the same,” she says. “Now, from Japan to Europe to America, there are different tastes, different trends—even different functional expectations. For example, the Japanese still buy wallets because the Japanese still use cash—nowhere else. So you have to be more local, more precise.”
With the world remaking itself before our eyes, the whole project of luxury fashion seems due for a round of reinvention. How it’s made and sold; the part it plays in people’s lives and in the culture as a whole; the creative director’s role. All of that is going to evolve. Something will succeed spectacle—but what? “We’re pushing a lot of techniques that are quite subtle and we like that—we like that people won’t exactly get it from a photo.” So says McCollough, offering another clue when I reconnect with him and Hernandez later in the summer. The collection is taking shape now and office nights are later. Often, they don’t arrive home until almost 11pm, McCollough says, “and then dinner is eggs” purchased from the mum-and-pop marché across the street from their new apartment. (Also in the 7th, also a short-term sublet— ”still looking,” McCollough explains.)
They like the 7th: its quiet; its breathability; its small, owner-operated shops selling fish and wine and bread and cheese. It’s liveable, in the way they want their evolving collection to be liveable, balancing a sense of the moment with a sense of “the real”. They talk about “softness” and “sensuality” and “warmth”—feeling words, not seeing words. New York City fashion darlings they may have been, but Hernandez and McCollough were an ill fit with the era of spectacle. A Proenza Schouler collection never punched you in the face. Rather, they lured you in with their nuance, a meticulous arrangement of detail—cut, colour, material, construction—that added up to an attitude, a direction.
“Right from the outset, they had a very clear idea of what a cool wardrobe for a woman was, and it was totally their own,” says Sally Singer, the president of Art + Commerce and a former Vogue digital creative director. “And right now what I’d tell them is: no one needs new clothes. If you throw everything into the perfection of ready-to-wear and think people are going to buy these looks headto-toe, you’re living in another decade. And I say this as someone who still wears those stripey T-shirts they were making early on: they have held up.”
Singer was also a member of the judging committee of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund that awarded Proenza Schouler its inaugural prize in 2004. She had faith in them then and she has faith in them now. “Their instincts are so good—shoes, bags, red carpet, denim, sportswear. At Loewe, they can build out a whole world of things that make someone feel special,” Singer continues. “A bag charm, a candle—objects at every price point. I think that’s the job now, as a creative director: finding ways for people to interact with your brand, even when they’re not buying anything.”
On 17 April 2015, Hernandez and McCollough did a talk with Singer at Alliance Française in New York City. Asked about the possibility of working for a luxury house, McCollough replied that they’d been approached more than once, and while the wealth of resources on offer made it tempting, “what’s most important to us right now is Proenza Schouler”. A decade later almost to the day, the duo was on a plane to Paris, work visas in hand.
“It’s been an itch,” says McCollough. Their label’s 20th anniversary came and went. “And we were starting to ask: is this it? Like, a life should have chapters—is this our only chapter? Of course we have such a place in our hearts for [Proenza Schouler], but that’s all we’ve done since we were 19. And, creatively, it was getting to be a bit like, maybe we’ve said what we need to say.”
Over two decades, Hernandez and McCollough established a durable Proenza Schouler brand vocabulary. Now, they say, they are curious to see how the new designer—appointed but not yet announced—will evolve it. They remain on the board and are available, McCollough notes, “for questions”.
Aside from that, it’s a clean break. “We’re very unsentimental,” Hernandez says. “We’ve never even been to our own archive,” McCollough adds. “But that’s the nature of fashion: what’s next?” concludes Hernandez.
They are not homesick. They don’t even miss their friends, both because they’ve brought some to Paris to work with them and because so many others keep showing up in town. My day with them at Loewe HQ ends with a visit to Centre Pompidou for the preview of its blockbuster Wolfgang Tillmans show, where Hernandez and McCollough are meeting up with artist Nate Lowman, one of several pals making their way through the city en route to Art Basel. Leaving the office, we—total happenstance— run into an old friend of McCollough’s sister. “There’s always someone in Paris!” exclaims Hernandez.
“There’s a vibrancy and positivity to that culture that bleeds into the vibe of the brand—it’s high fashion, but it’s fun.”
It seemed like Jack ‘n’ Laz were pitching me on moving here too. Their commute home, they say, is a ramble through the Tuileries, and then—with these late summer nights—watching the sun set over the Seine as they cross the bridge to the Left Bank. On weekends: art—or an hour’s flight gets them to London, the Alps, Saint-Tropez. Two hours? The world’s their oyster.
I press them. You don’t miss anything? They consider the question. “I think if either of us was doing this alone, it’d be different, it’d be scary,” McCollough says. Hernandez nods vigorously. “Totally. That’s what’s unique about us. Anywhere we go, if we’re together, we’re home.”
The curious thing about Loewe is that, in a sense, it’s both LVMH’s oldest and youngest luxury house. It began as a collective of leather craftsmen in Madrid in 1846; Hermès is older, but not by much. For most of Loewe’s modern era, it’s been a well-regarded Spanish brand dealing in handbags and leather goods. Then Anderson came along in 2013 and transformed Loewe into the puckish international luxury fashion house we know it as now. By those lights, Loewe is 179 years old and also 12. Anyone who succeeded Anderson had to embrace both Loewe’s emerging, designer-like youth and what is magisterially old in it—its Spanish roots. According to Lepoivre, one recommendation in Hernandez and McCollough’s favour was how much the Spanish-ness resonated: “It’s something other designers have not known how to play with.”
Hernandez, whose extended family hails from Spain, agrees with Lepoivre that this aspect of the house has gotten a bit lost. “There’s a vibrancy and positivity to that culture that bleeds into the vibe of the brand—it’s high fashion, but it’s fun,” he says. “But there’s a note that’s missing; a sense of body—not sexiness, that’s something else; but a sense of skin. I don’t know, just, Spanish-ness.”
“Solarity?” offers McCollough. “Like, sun, heat, but also, there’s dance, there’s food. You’re welcomed—lots of hugging. It’s soulful.”
Yet again, talking around the edges of their debut collection, I found Hernandez and McCollough speaking in experiential terms. I know this was due in part to their not yet wanting to tell me what the collection was beginning to look like, to keep hidden a little longer the “solarity” of their blazing palette, for instance. But I also believe it’s because they are invested in tangibility.
Hernandez and McCollough will happily talk through every centuries-old hand-stitching technique still in use in Getafe and every high-tech leather treatment developed at the Loewe lab. What binds them to the house—and what binds old and new Loewe together—is craft.
It’s so tempting to say that what will fix fashion is a return to the artisanal—let luxury be luxury; how about we slow things down. It’s like saying that what will fix Hollywood is better movies. Will it? People still need to go see the films.
I’m not entirely sure that a changing of the guard at the big houses can, on its own, rid us of this sense of directionlessness, this endless-scroll feeling. The nature of our technocapitalist society is to give us an overabundance of options—and the challenge for a creative director today, I believe, is to figure out how to stop doing that. People don’t want meaningless options. What designers need to do now is provide shoppers with actual choices: product that inspires, that feels vital and new and provokes deep desire, yearning—as opposed to a moment’s hover of a fingertip before swiping on to the next coat, the next bag, the next shoe.
What does that entail? My instinct is that this moment requires designers with their heads way up in the clouds and feet planted firmly on the ground. Bold, distinctive visions, executed with finesse and with wearability top of mind, so that when you touch their work, you comprehend that it was crafted to be loved and to last. That’s when you feel like a luxury good is worth what it costs.
Hernandez and McCollough may indeed be the right people for this job. When I met up with them, they were in their starry-eyed phase, testing the limits of their new atelier. “It’s like a big funhouse, playing around, seeing how far we can push things,” Hernandez said. A month later, though, playtime is winding down. “Now we’re going through the collection, reining it in,” Hernandez tells me.
Americans in Paris. That practical streak may be not only Loewe’s next chapter, but fashion’s way forward. The antidote to spectacle is the real. “We want it to feel desirable,” McCollough says. “We want these to be clothes people can imagine living in.”
The September issue of Vogue Singapore—themed ‘The Big Fall issue’—is available to pre-order online and will be on newsstands from 4 September.
