Proenza Schouler Fall 2018 Ready-To-Wear...Fashionweekly..On Fow24news.com

“We took it back to California, to handcraft, women’s lib,” said Lazaro Hernandez. “But we were thinking about this voyager, picking things up as she goes along. A voyager across borders....
” In breaking away to show in Paris for the second time, Proenza Schouler got the jump on the New York Fall ready-to-wear season again. Funnily enough, though, their status as Americans showing in Paris had caused them to reflect on what the culture of couture might mean in the USA. Jack McCollough said they’d seen an exhibit of the work of the great American textile artist Sheila Hicks, and that she had been the catalyst. In a world of endlessly churned out machine-made stuff, the feeling for craft—that which shows the loving hand of the people who made it—is enjoying its biggest comeback since the right-on early ’70s.

So in some ways, this read as a neo-hippy collection, but in others as the work of the clean and precise New York city designers we know Proenza Schouler to be. Wherever they take their woman, there’s a polish and a sexiness about her. They worked with tie-dye, macramé, woven leather, prints, and Western patchwork. Fringing and velvet came into it, as well as big, suspended necklaces of beaten metal, straight out of the art jewelry tradition of the ’60s and ’70s.

Nothing loosey-goosey about the results, though. Their fit-and-flare silhouettes, cut to skim the ankle, often came intersected with bra tops or plunging keyhole necklines. The world-traveler eclecticism hit its limits at the outerwear—a slew of luxurious shearling and tailored coats, punctuated with brass clips and buttons. If that’s for a traveler, she’s flying first-class.