In an exclusive interview for A#9, Vanity Fair‘s Ingrid Sischy talks to Jack McCullough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler. From their first meeting [one of them in drag] to chainsmoking, from their artistic influences and the people who supported the boys along the way, the conversation is a truly intimate dialogue, taking place in their studio in early 2009. Featured on pages 14-23 of A MAGAZINE curated by Proenza Schouler and republished exclusively online here.

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INGRID SISCHY: So this is your lair?

LAZARO HERNANDEZ: This is our lair.

JACK McCULLOUGH: We close the door and then we spend 10 hours every day in here.

INGRID: You’ve just come back from a trip, I understand.

JACK: We were so inspired by it. Normally, at this time we go to Premiere Vision, the fabric show in Paris [in March], but it was during New York fashion week [in February] this year, so instead we went to French Polynesia—Bora Bora, Tahiti, and Moorea.

INGRID: That’s a much better idea.

LAZARO: We wrote notes thanking people for all the party invites in Paris, saying, “Sorry, we’ll be in Tahiti.” We went on a website called LuxuryLink.com—

JACK: Where you can bid on luxury packages.

LAZARO: Legit stuff. We’ve done it before.

JACK: We went to Bora Bora a few years ago, too.

LAZARO: Yeah. And we went to the Seychelles a few years after that—we like to travel.

INGRID: I’ve never been to Bora Bora, but when I was getting ready for our conversation here for A Magazine and looking back at your collection for spring/summer of 2005, I wrote down the words “Gauguin and Tahiti.”

JACK: Totally. That was right after our first trip there.

LAZARO: It was like this time. We went after a fall show before we started on a spring collection.

JACK: We were there for about 10 days, which is perfect because the first 3 or 4 days—

LAZARO: — It’s hard to—

JACK: — Turn off your brain.

LAZARO: You are working your face off, and then you get there, and you don’t have anything to do. You get a little antsy at first. A lot of chain smoking.

JACK: Day 4 is when you start to mellow out. We had a good week after that and decompressed, and just hung out.

INGRID: Like Gauguin—did you go there to get away from it all? Is Gauguin an artist who has meant something to you?

LAZARO: As a kid I remember reading about Gauguin, who wanted to escape society and discovered that through isolation he could find himself and experience the utmost creativity. He wanted to go to the farthest place in the world and chose Tahiti, and later the Marquesas Islands, which are really, really remote. At that time there was cannibalism there.

INGRID: Like the cannibalism you have in the fashion world?

[LAUGHTER]

LAZARO: Yeah!

JACK: Exactly.

INGRID: On these trips do you talk about the next collection?

LAZARO: We don’t talk about fashion. We only talk about fashion in this room.

INGRID: The room where we are sitting now? Do we have to leave the room if we want to talk about nonfashion subjects?

LAZARO: No, we can talk about anything in this room. But if you want to talk about fashion you can only talk about it in this room. Jack and I are together 24/7, so if we take fashion home at night, it’s—

JACK: — We need to be able to separate from it—we need to figure out ways to separate our worlds, because all our worlds are so intertwined. It’s like having a TV in the bedroom. It can be dangerous. Your bed is for certain things. The office is for certain things. Dinner is for certain things.

INGRID: When did you come up with this system?

LAZARO: It took us a couple of years to figure it out.

JACK: We might get into some sort of argument at work about something, have some kind of creative difference, but then we leave work, it’s us and we’re together. Otherwise it’s easy for things to drag over.

LAZARO: Like I’m still mad about–

JACK: — That button! [LAUGHTER] Or we could have some sort of personal conflict, and then we have to come in and work together. Not only do we do every single thing together, there’s no hierarchy. It’s as if we’re a flat-topped pyramid.

LAZARO: There’s no CEO. There’s no king at the top. There are just the two of us. If he thinks this and I think that, we have to figure out a way to get there. If he thinks black, and I think white, we end up doing gray.

JACK: Sometimes I feel like our most successful collections have been the ones where I’m feeling more this direction, you’re feeling more that direction, and we have to figure out a way to meld those two together, and hopefully create something that’s new. It’s an interesting, weird process.

INGRID: So on a vacation you’re just absorbing things, taking some pictures, relaxing, and then when you get back to this room is when you start talking work?

LAZARO: Because we’re not allowed to talk about fashion to each other when we’re away, I’ll say to Jack: “Oh, look at that lady, what she’s wearing is kind of amazing, right?” He’ll say, “Yeah, it’s cool.” And that’s like a seed.

INGRID: This system of how to survive in a relationship that is both a personal relationship and a work relationship, did you come up with it after you had difficulties?

JACK: Definitely.

INGRID: I wasn’t really paying attention at the time because the gossip seemed so silly, but a few years after you began and immediately took the fashion world by storm, weren’t there some famous difficulties?

JACK: Yeah. There was some sort of famous difficulty.

INGRID: Did one of you run off with somebody? And the other didn’t.

LAZARO: It was hyped. People write their own angles. What happened was we were living together, we worked together, we were doing –

JACK: We were living at our office.

LAZARO: So we would wake up in the same bed, in the same room where we worked. There was no division at all, and we had a problem. After that we decided that not working together was not an option and not being together was not an option, but maybe that not living together was an option. So we chose to live separately in the city. Actually five blocks from each other. We see each other all the time. It was just survival. It was misconstrued as if we were breaking up. Most people saw it as a step backward. We saw it as a step forward. It was a way through the problem, a way to find what works for us. Then we have a house upstate together. And we’re together there all the time. So we share a house, have separate houses, and we work together.

LAZARO: In the city we spend a lot of time together in the evenings still, but if he needs his own space or I need my own space after work, we have it. I’m an only child. I have to have my own space, and he needs his.

JACK: In my family, there were five kids.

LAZARO: They’re all personalities. So we like our own space for different reasons.

INGRID: LAZARO, when you were a kid, looking at Gauguin books, where were you?

LAZARO: In Miami.

INGRID: Were there art books around?

LAZARO: Yes, but not because of my parents so much. It was more just me. I had a curiosity about art. And being Cuban, I was always trying to find a way to express that aesthetic in an elevated way. I was trying to find a parallel universe.

INGRID: Did you go to Cuba?

LAZARO: All the time when I was a kid. Both my parents are Cuban. My dad’s family was here, but my mother left her entire family back there, so we would go every summer. My dad would say, “I’m not going back until that man dies!”

INGRID: That’s how many Cubans feel. Lazaro, did you know you were going to be some kind of designer or artist?

LAZARO: Actually, I was supposed to be a doctor. I did two years of pre-med.

INGRID: For you or for your parents?

LAZARO: Totally for my parents, of course. You know how that is. I knew I wanted to be successful. All my life, my parents busted their asses to send me to good enough schools. They sacrificed everything for me. So I felt I had to be a doctor or a lawyer.

INGRID: OK. Now we’re going to switch to Jack. So while all this was going on with Lazaro, what was going on with you Jack? Where were you? Were you also pre-med?

JACK: No, I came from quite a different world. Dare I say we would not have been friends in high school. I was a bit of a rowdier teenager. I got things out of my system quite early on. I grew up in Montclair, New Jersey. My dad was a banker. He is retired now, but he worked on Wall Street.

INGRID: Were you born in New Jersey?

JACK: I was actually born in Tokyo. Then we moved to New Jersey. I grew up saying “yes sir, no sir,” with very strict, conservative parents. Then I hit puberty and became a raging teenager, getting into a lot of trouble. I was very rebellious.

INGRID: What was the biggest trouble you got into?

JACK: Being picked up by the police, that kind of thing.

LAZARO: Or running away from home?

JACK: [LAUGHS] To go on tour with the Dead.

INGRID: That’s funny.

JACK: Well, I got kicked out of high school my sophomore year, so I took off. I went away for a bunch of months and had an amazing time.

INGRID: Why were you chucked out of school?

JACK: I was arrested over a weekend for smoking a little bit of pot at a party with friends. Silly stuff, really. The local newspaper wrote an article about it because they had nothing better to write about. They listed the names of the kids who were over 18, they said there were other kids, too. So of course, my school calls the police to find out the other names and they kicked all of us out because they said we made the school look bad. It was one of those conservative college preparatory schools. You know, jacket and tie kind of place. Being thrown out was the best thing that happened to me because I ended up going to a boarding school, which is fantastic and really motivated me to find my passions. I never felt that passionate in the previous school, which was focused on sports and math and science and academics. It wasn’t helping me find my path. I was frustrated there. I’m sure being gay had something to do with it. Instead of coming out of the closet, I thought I’ll just be the weirdo.

INGRID: How did you end up in the arty boarding school?

JACK: I’d always really been interested in art. I always took art classes, starting at 6 or 7. I thought I wanted to be a painter.

INGRID: Were there particular artists who you looked at?

JACK: Early on it was the bigger artists—the Gauguins, for the colors, the Van Goghs, the Cezannes. But later I especially liked Munch and German Expressionism.

INGRID: Tell me more about the school that helped you begin to find your voice.

JACK: 9 to 12 was academics, and 1 to 6 was just painting and sculpture. On Fridays there were no academics, just painting and sculpture. I finally had this mentor, who I really looked up to, and he was really encouraging, and I went from being a straight D student in my sophomore year to top of my class senior year. It was a big boost. And I made some great friends. There were about 200 girls, 100 boys.  About 80 of the 100 boys were gay.  [LAUGHS]

INGRID: And the girls?

JACK: Not as many, but plenty.

INGRID: You could have had a parade.

JACK: [LAUGHS] Yes. I came out of the closet really early on.

INGRID: And after this school?

JACK: Then I went to the San Francisco Art Institute. I thought I was going to be a glass blower, [LAUGHTER] and I was doing a lot of painting. Then I transferred to Parsons.

INGRID: Where you famously met Lazaro. Right? Lazaro, when did you get there?

LAZARO: Well, I’d been at the University of Miami, studying medicine, in a six-year program that combined pre-med and medical school.

INGRID: Were you kind of the opposite of Jack?

LAZARO: I was in my own little bubble. I had a girlfriend. In college I was in a fraternity.

INGRID: What was the name of the fraternity?

LAZARO: Alpha Sigma Phi!

INGRID: And your folks?

LAZARO: My parents were really mellow, really relaxed with me. They would go out later than I would sometimes.

INGRID: Were your parents successful? Did they struggle?

LAZARO: They came to America with the clothes on their backs. My dad has a Cuban baseball background. He played minor league baseball. That’s how he started making money. He opened up his own company within five years of coming to America, and mom opened up a set of beauty salons within five years. I’m the only son, so after school, I would go with her. My dad wanted me to be a baseball player too. I was like ugh! I don’t want to do that. So my mom said, “Oh, just come with me to the salon.” So the environment I grew up in was about ladies getting their hair done, and my mother had the Vogues and Bazaars laid out, and I would read them. That’s how I was introduced to the world of fashion.

INGRID: When you got to college what changed that you ended up at Parsons?

LAZARO: I began to get in touch with the fact that I did not like what I was doing studying medicine. And I started to do badly in school, which was really weird for me. I found myself in this place where I was really unhappy. So I started taking art classes as electives. I met a guy who lived in New York and I visited him here. I thought, Wow! New York, Wow! My eyes were opened. I went back to Miami, and decided to apply to one school in New York, Parsons.

INGRID: How did you know about it?

LAZARO: I had friends who went there. I decided that if I was accepted, I would move to New York. I’m leaving all this behind, and I’m going there, I thought.

INGRID: Did your folks know you applied to Parsons?

LAZARO: No. I thought that if I wasn’t accepted, I would not tell anyone. I would just deal with it and be a doctor, which is what my dad’s brother who was gay did. He came out at 50 years old. He got married, had kids, and grandkids, the whole thing. And he finally came out when he was 50. My father was like, “What do you mean you’re gay!?” Like, what?! That would have been me. But I applied to Parsons, and I got in. And I told my parents “I’m doing it.” I moved here with my best friend, but he returned to Miami after a few months.

INGRID: What did you bring when you arrived? A lava lamp?

[EVERYONE LAUGHS]

LAZARO: I had shorts and t-shirts. Really I came with nothing. My family gave me these contacts they had in New Jersey. Friends of the family. That’s where I stayed until I found roommates through posters and things at school. Jack, do you remember that first summer that I moved here? We met randomly. Before we even started Parsons.

INGRID: That’s crazy.  How did that happen? Do you both remember the same thing?

LAZARO: We remember that night very well.  [LAUGHTER]

INGRID: All right, I want to hear.

JACK: Well, we’ve never told the real version.

LAZARO: You’re the first person who gets the real version of this.

INGRID: A magazine scoop! OK, fire away.

JACK: I was out with a bunch of friends, including Chris, a friend from San Francisco, who’d moved here with me, and we had kind of gotten dressed up that night.

INGRID: What do you mean kind of?

LAZARO: It was drag.  [LAUGHS] Really badly done. Like the hippy from San Francisco, like dreadlocks, like in drag with hairy legs.

INGRID: Makes sense for a boy who ran away with the Grateful Dead.

JACK: [LAUGHS] And then I met Lazaro. I was walking into the back room, which is the VIP room, and he was thinking, how did he get in?

LAZARO: I was with a couple of friends who were really wasted, I remember. And there was this one room where all these people kept going. I had to go back there! What’s up with that?! It turned out it was girl’s night. And I thought, oh, please, how am I going to have one of these girls get me in? So I went up to Jack, who was in costume, and I was like: “Hey, what’s happening? You going back there?”

INGRID: Did you know how cute Jack was?

LAZARO: No! He was like a cartoon, a performance vehicle, [LAUGHTER] it wasn’t like a human!

JACK: I was 10 feet tall.

LAZARO: You were in 10-foot tall shoes. I asked, “Oh, do you mind getting me back there?” And you said, “Come with me.”

JACK: And then we were kind of hanging out together.

LAZARO: I stuck with him because I had no one else to talk to.

INGRID: That’s pretty funny.

JACK: You had just gotten to New York. At first you were kind of scared to talk to me. But then you said, “I’m just starting school, I just transferred to Parson’s.” And I went, “Whoa! I go there too.”

LAZARO: I think we exchanged numbers, and said we should hang out sometime. I don’t know why I said that. It’s so not me to give my numbers to someone in drag.

INGRID: And then?

JACK: We hung out at the Bowery Bar, or something. I think we met up there for a drink with some other people.

INGRID: And this time, he looked like –

LAZARO: Jack, yeah.

INGRID: Lazaro, were you pleasantly surprised?

LAZARO: I was surprised. He was so cool. He looked really interesting. And then we were friends forever, before we got together.

JACK: We both had long-term relationships. We were good friends for about three years, before we got together. We started dating our junior year.

INGRID: At first did it occur to either of you that you would end up in a collaborative working relationship?

LAZARO: No.

JACK: No, not at all.

INGRID: Did you both love Parsons?

JACK: No.

LAZARO: We hated it. But Parsons is great. It is the reason we are where we are today, because it gave us a platform. We owe a lot to the school.

INGRID: So when was the Eureka moment, when you realized that two was better than one?

JACK: When we started at Parsons we got put in the same section. All of a sudden we had every single class together, every day, which is why we really became friends, and how we got to know each other. We’d do our homework together.

LAZARO: I’d say, “I’m thinking this and that.” Or I’d go, “I think you should do it a little bit more like this.” Or he’d say, “What are you going to do about that?” And little by little, our separate projects–

JACK: — Started morphing, and became one.

LAZARO: We had a lot of references in common. We had moved to New York around the same time. We had accumulated a life here that intersected in a lot of ways.

JACK: You should see our sketches. It’s kind of scary how connected they are.

INGRID: Did Parsons have a system in place for students who wanted to collaborate?

LAZARO: What happened next is that Tim Gunn, who’s now like a celebrity, was the fashion department’s head guy at the time.

INGRID: The guy from Project Runway? That’s nuts. [LAUGHS]

LAZARO: Well, so at the end of junior year, we started prepping for a big thesis senior year, which is a collection shown on the runway. Over the summer we asked Tim if we could both focus on one collection together. We asked him, “Will you let us do one collection together?” We said, “We promise you that it’ll go somewhere.” He was really cool. He gave us permission. That had never been done in the history of Parsons.

JACK: No one had ever collaborated on a thesis.

LAZARO: Tim was one of the ones who really supported us. We’d be—

JACK: — cutting school, sneaking into shows—

LAZARO: — Yeah, I’d be saying, “Fuck this, I’m ditching class, it’s more important for me to go to the Helmut Lang show.” Tim knew what we were doing. He said, “You can have one portfolio together. You go out into the workplace and show potential people –”

JACK: — which we did. We went on interviews [LAUGHS]. I remember one prospective boss said: “Wait. I don’t understand. You guys come together? I have to hire both of you?

INGRID: Two salaries or one salary?

LAZARO: No, no, no, 2 salaries. We’re two people but we work as one.

INGRID: That collection you did together at Parsons is now famous. What happened?

LAZARO: We presented it and one of the judges was Peter Arnold, executive director of the CFDA, who introduced us to Julie Gilhart at Barneys.

INGRID: And wham, bam, you were made in the shade! Before that, though, hadn’t you both interned at some prestigious fashion houses?

JACK: I’d interned for Marc Jacobs. And he was at Michael Kors.

INGRID: That must have been handy on-the-job experience.

JACK: It was. And Michael donated his fabrics to us for our senior collection, which was amazing.

LAZARO: We kind of broke the rules. We were supposed to sew it ourselves.

INGRID: What did you do?

JACK: We had it all made. I still don’t see anything wrong with that. Once you start working in the industry, that’s what you’re doing. It’s about being able to have a dialogue. 99 percent of the time it’s about being able to communicate your ideas to the pattern director, to the seamstresses, and having them execute them.

LAZARO: But we would have been expelled, for this.

INGRID: Really. Did they ask for your certificates back, when they found out?

LAZARO: No, we never graduated.

INGRID: And I can see it has really held you back. The collection you did together won the school’s Golden Thimble award.

JACK: We won the Golden Thimble!

LAZARO: Please tell my father that!

INGRID: Did you tell him?

LAZARO: No! “Dad, guess what I won this year? The Golden Thimble!”

INGRID: You mean symbol?!

LAZARO: No. It’s Thimble.  [LAUGHTER]

INGRID: And that entire collection was bought by Barneys New York, right?

JACK: Yeah.

LAZARO: Julie asked, “So, you guys are in business?!” “We’re not sure,” we said. She replied, “Let me know if you guys are serious about this.” That’s when we asked ourselves: “Why should we work for anybody? Fuck this! We don’t want to work for anyone else. Why would we work for anyone else? If Barneys is interested in the collection, screw it. Let’s start our own label.”

INGRID: Which you did at the age of 23.

LAZARO: We had to hustle immediately.

JACK: Julie ordered the clothes in May. And it was for a September delivery, so we had to scramble. We didn’t know what we were doing. She placed multiple orders, for the same piece. All of a sudden, we had to figure out how to grade to different sizes.

LAZARO: And produce!

JACK: And get the fabrics. All of the fabrics we’d used had come from Michael Kors. But then we had to get our own.

LAZARO: We never went back to school after that. We just ditched it.

INGRID: Did you write them a letter?

LAZARO: No. We just never went back. It was a scramble. We had to print up labels. We were tossing names around.

INGRID: You ended up using your mothers’ names for the company.

LAZARO: Proenza is my mother’s [maiden] name. Schouler is his mother’s [maiden] name.

INGRID: What was the breakthrough for this idea?

JACK: What else did we toss around?

LAZARO: We had so many ideas. How about Jack Lazaro? Lazaro and Jack? Let’s call it The Boys! Our last names seemed cheesy. McCollough and Hernandez? Hernandez-McCollough?  Barf. We just wanted a weird name that didn’t relate to us. Because if it failed, then we could use our names for something else. So we ended up with our mother’s maiden names.

INGRID: Were your mothers happy?

JACK: So happy!

INGRID: And were your parents happy that you were starting your own collection?

LAZARO: Yeah! And scared.

JACK: Well, my dad was kind of anti, because he felt like we should go out and work for someone first. Make our mistakes on someone else’s barrel. But now they’re psyched. They love it. They’re super into it.

INGRID: Jack, I think I saw your dad at the last show. He seemed very proud.

JACK: Yes, he’s really enthusiastic about it. We have grown a lot closer through all this. He’s always giving us business advice, and giving us some pointers.

INGRID: That must have been especially helpful at the beginning.

LAZARO: It was such an exciting time. So cool.

INGRID: Tell me more. What happened when American Vogue called you in?

LAZARO: When we got our first credit Anna [Wintour, editor of Vogue] called us in.

JACK: We had to bring our whole senior collection up there. Throw it in a taxi. And the next month, we had a Helmut Newton credit, in Vogue.

LAZARO: So we were like, cool!

JACK: And that gave us so much encouragement. We lived at the office, but it was amazing.

INGRID: Where was this office?

JACK: On Walker Street, in Chinatown.

LAZARO: It was a loft.

JACK: It was pretty big, about 4,000 square feet.

INGRID: What else was exciting about that period?

JACK: We had total creative freedom to do whatever we chose. On top of it, there were no pre-collections. So we got 6 months, twice a year, to really delve into a world, and explore it. Everything we did those first few years was so new to us. And the newness was exciting.

INGRID: Scary?

LAZARO: We were never scared. That’s one thing. It was so exciting for us and so much fun. Like putting on a show, being able to cast the girls that we were looking at in magazines and stuff.  All of a sudden they were in our studio. We weren’t worrying about what was going to sell. We didn’t have any overhead. We didn’t have any record of sales. Any employees. It didn’t matter.

INGRID: You still don’t have many. Today I was a little worried that I was going to be about 10 minutes late for our interview, so I asked our assistant editor to call, and he said that when he asked for your assistant, whoever answered the phone said, “We don’t have assistants,” and basically hung up.

LAZARO: I don’t know what an assistant would do for us?

JACK: It would be more for personal stuff.

LAZARO: I want a personal assistant. But we’re not like that.

INGRID: Earlier you said you weren’t worried about what would sell at the beginning. How about now?

JACK: Now it’s a different ballgame, it really is.

INGRID: What would you say the differences are?

JACK: The work is so much more a part of the business part. Wouldn’t you say that?

LAZARO: Yes.

JACK: We have to try and chisel out these times of creativity. And things can’t be done on a whim. We just did our calendar, and we have these allocated sections where we go upstate and be inspired and sketch. But then we have to come back and have a board meeting and then do a trunk show and –

INGRID: You do your calendars together, just the two of you?

JACK: Today, it was the whole company.

INGRID: Who is in it? Give me some of the people.

JACK: We have a COO and CFO.

INGRID: Is the CFO the same person as the COO?

JACK: No. The COO is Shirley, who started with us. She started at Helmut Lang in PR. She was a good friend of ours. We were like, “Shirley, we have all these receipts. We don’t know what to do with them!” So she started coming over after work and organizing our receipts.

INGRID: And where’s the CFO now that the Valentino Fashion Group SpA took a 45% stake in the company?

JACK: Our CFO is in the New York office of the Valentino Fashion Group, and is down here at the studio a lot, too, but not in our way.

INGRID: So basically, it’s a tight structure.

JACK: We never had a structure to base it on because we never really worked for anyone else.

INGRID: Thus you had to invent it?

JACK: We made up our own system. We just kind of –

LAZARO: — We let Shirley create the structure of the business and the company. She’s been doing this since Day One. She goes out with JACK’s brother. She’s like a family member.

JACK: It’s very incestuous.

INGRID: And very “do-it-yourself.” Which leads me to the next theme. When Sandy Brant [Sischy’s partner, and Co-International Editor of Vanity Fair Italy, Vanity Fair Spain, Vogue Germany, and Vogue Russia] and I first saw your work, what struck us is that it felt really original. A lot of the time in fashion when you look at something, it reminds you of something else. It’s super-hard to come up with something original. And right from the beginning with your work we were not saying, “Oh, it looks like so-and-so’s stuff.”

JACK: That’s cool.

LAZARO: I think that’s a result of us being of a particular generation that wasn’t represented in fashion already. There were not many designers our age. And I think when you’re a certain age, you have certain influences that are particular to that age group.

Sischy: What immediately stuck out about the design was how polished it was. But there was a sense of newness, too.

LAZARO: Everyone has cheesy ideas, and it’s good to have that person who’s going to say, “No, that’s a bad idea.” It’s a system of checks and balances.

INGRID: What about others who have come before you who inspire you? Name some please.

JACK: Christian Dior.

LAZARO: Definitely.

JACK: ’47 to ’57

LAZARO: We know every single one of his collections.

INGRID: The “New Look.” And you two often have your own take on his idea of the corset. If one looks through your collections from the beginning to now, there’s the Proenza Schouler bustier intervention. Its presence is omnipresent. It’s not a Dior corset, it’s more like a combo of something out of the comics—for a super heroine—and a fashion statement. But it definitely gives a nod to Mr. Dior.

LAZARO: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JACK: I feel like it started with the fact that we’re obsessed with coats. Especially coats with volume. Coats with a lot of shape. And so we wanted some sort of contradiction, to juxtapose with these larger shaped coats. We wanted something tied to the body.

INGRID: Did you feel like otherwise the coats were too baggy? Not sexy? You’re young, you’re supposed to do sexy clothes.

LAZARO: I don’t believe that. I don’t think people have to be sexy. Or have to dress sexy. I think they just are. I think when you get older, then you start to like feel as if you have to show—“look I still got it!” Look at these girls, they’re in oversized clothes and layers. It’s the older ladies that wear the tight body clothes, because they think they have to show that they still got it. Twenty-year-olds don’t even talk about that stuff. We don’t. We grew up during the dot-com, grunge thing, casual Fridays, when people weren’t dressing up at all.

JACK: It was a time when younger designers, when we were in college especially, were deconstructing everything, ripping things up. Everyone was all of a sudden calling themselves a designer, doing all these ripped-up t-shirts. We were kind of turned off by that. We wanted to figure out how to construct clothes, to make shapes. Looking at a lot of shapes and silhouettes took us to the path of Christian Dior.

LAZARO: And the images of photographers like Avedon and Penn…these women, like Dovima, who look like aliens…these intense poses…like the picture of Dovima with the elephant. Their makeup is so stark. It’s almost minimal in the graphics and the hair, the noses—the arch fashion image of the ’50s seemed so intense and foreign to us, we were attracted to it. It was a fuck you in a weird way.

INGRID: You mean fuck you to the trends that were going on when you were beginning?

LAZARO: Exactly.

JACK: To have a sense of polish—

INGRID: The word the young editors were using at the time, was “lady.” What did you think of that word?

LAZARO: It’s very Carolina Herrera. It wasn’t really that. We were into the French dead lady.

JACK: Who died decades before, so she was a total fantasy to us. It was so surreal to us.

INGRID: Is it also about what you thought people were hungering for in their closets?

LAZARO: We weren’t thinking of that.

JACK: We weren’t thinking about the customer. The girl in our head was a made-up girl. She didn’t really exist, except for in our heads. Where’s that girl who we thought existed?!

LAZARO: Part of it is to capture her spirit. And it’s that inability to actually capture her that makes us fall short. Sometimes we’ll make it too baggy or mixed and matched and it’s—

INGRID: But you want that feeling of falling short of capturing her, right?

LAZARO: Totally.

INGRID: That’s part of the excitement of the collections, when they work at their best. One sees you reaching for her, but not landing on her. If you landed on her, you would just be doing something nostalgic.

JACK: Or something that’s been done.

LAZARO: She’s a cross-section of our reality and what we love, and our dreams. Somewhere in that gray area is where Proenza Schouler lies. The work is our personal history mixed with our fantasies, somehow.

JACK: There’s a bit of a boy/girl quality to it as well.

LAZARO: Look at our last collection with the short boy blazers. And the t-shirts.

JACK: We design for ourselves in a way. You know, if we were girls how would we want to dress?

INGRID: Part of the letdown of so many women’s clothes is that designers don’t ask that. They overload the clothes with their baggage of what they think women are, which is often an old idea of women.

JACK: Not relevant to women today.

INGRID: Somehow with this boy/girl thing that you have in your heads, you go beyond making androgynous clothes, which is the usual solution.

LAZARO: We design what we want to. We went to Marfa in Texas [where Donald Judd’s base was] and we thought about Minimalism and about mid-century and about stark and then spring [2009] happened.

INGRID: Can you elaborate some more.

LAZARO: We’d just gotten back from Marfa, and that whole aesthetic had really inspired us. It was purely American but not in a Bill Blass American prep thing way. Those artists—Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, and Robert Ryman—were a huge, huge, huge influence in this collection.

INGRID: The white paintings?

LAZARO: The commitment to white and the idea of how the paintings hung on the wall, with rivets. How things were put together. The sparseness of the white and the toughness of the rivets. There’s an honesty of how things are put together that we wanted. And that’s when Rosie the Riveter came in–

JACK: — With the jumpsuits. Then the recession happened, not the best time to have a collection of jumpsuits. [LAUGHS]

INGRID: I disagree. You need jumpsuits on the bread line.

JACK: Right. And Rosie the Riveter.

LAZARO: That’s who we were looking at.

INGRID: Well, you hit the zeitgeist right on the nose.

JACK: We found these incredible images from the Library of Congress of women going to work in the factories when all the men went away to the war.

INGRID: ’40s.

JACK: Yes. Their hair was kind of coiffed. They had a bit of a red lip and these men’s gloves on.

LAZARO: Dirty gloves.

JACK: They were building airplanes. That was spring ’09.

INGRID: Those were some shoes you showed with the collection.

JACK: Rosie was working in the factory and her heel fell off. So she found one of the machine parts, and screwed it on to the bottom of her shoe!

INGRID: One more thing about that collection. Judd and Ryman—part of the beauty of that work is that it exposes the process.

LAZARO: Exactly. We wanted that.

INGRID: And now you’ve just shown clothes for fall ’09. In it you bucked the trend that ran through so many other fall ’09 collections—the old ’80s references. That’s not unusual for you. I’ve noticed with your collections that you do not join the fray of trend-spotting. I assume that is on purpose. You don’t care?

LAZARO: Well, I think it’s just that we’re not thinking that way. We just have our own little worlds and we delve into these worlds. This way we can move around a lot from collection to collection. If we get involved in one world, and then the collection is over, we can get away from that world. Spring was a collection of whites, and now I want to see black.

INGRID: But I’ve got to tell you, it may seem you move around a lot. And in a way you do, conceptually. But your voices are so specific that if one looks at the collections, there’s an amazing consistency. Some of it has to do with the palette. This constant thing of the neutrals that you have. The blacks, the whites, the grays, the taupes, the smokes. And then you always break it with some kind of jewel colors.

JACK and LAZARO: Yeah.

INGRID: Another touch that is super-consistent is the use of bustiers as an interruption.

JACK and LAZARO: Yeah.

INGRID: And often when one looks at the collections, it’s as if somebody has made paper-doll clothes. The clothes are like 3-D versions of 2-D drawings.

LAZARO: That’s amazing. Because we’re very 2-dimensional in that way. We are not drapers. We draw the looks. If it’s something that’s draped, we draw the drape. We figure out everything on paper.  So once we translate the sketch into reality, it maintains some of that flatness.

INGRID: That’s fascinating, because the clothes do feel like cutouts that then get animated by the body. That’s why it keeps the subtle feeling of comics too. That’s what makes them feel so fresh.

JACK and LAZARO: Wow.

INGRID: But there’s another kind of drawing too, that’s another constant. If one looks at the collections, there’s what I’m going to call “a Cy Twombly moment,” where there’s a scribbling that’s going on right in the fabrics. If you look from the beginning to the end of what you’ve done you’ll find all types of scribbling and drawing.

JACK: Twombly has always been a big influence for us.

LAZARO: A huge influence.

INGRID: And there’s yet another way you bring in lines—with the piping.

LAZARO: Right. The piping emphasizes the construction. Let’s say we draw a line, and we really like that line, but when it’s made in one fabric, a black fabric, for example, you don’t see that line. So, we’ll throw piping in there to show the line.

INGRID: What about all the felt?

JACK: We’re really attracted to heavy fabrics. And a certain woolliness, a certain dryness. I think we’re really attracted to contrasts, which is where you get that boy/girl thing again. You have the bustier but then it’s with some kind of bagginess, like men’s trousers. Or you’ll have a really flat, drab felt, but then you’ll have an electric kind of jewel tone.

LAZARO: Next to it.

JACK: You have shine and mattedness, masculine and feminine, big and small.

LAZARO: The aesthetic is based on the ’90s thing, and maybe the ’50s thing. And these two are diametrically opposed. Because we’re two people, we always say that the concept of contrast is an important element. So we try to contradict whatever we’re feeling, with the complete opposite.

INGRID: And you also contradict yourselves with the actual materials you use. There’s a real mixed-mediums thing going on. By all rights, these things should not be used in the same outfit, but you mix them in.

LAZARO: Like people who don’t follow the rules. What we’re interested in is the relationship between things. Like Robert Smithson’s glass and sand.

INGRID: Can you give me some equivalents of Smithson’s idea in your fashion?

LAZARO: PVC and felt. Or linen and PVC. Linen has a beachy quality to it, and PVC has a dominatrix kind of sex connotation.

JACK: Linen Jacquard with a plastic laminate, which takes away from its earthiness.

INGRID: The metallics? You use them a lot.

JACK: They contradict the felts. They contradict the organic that we are so attracted to.

INGRID: Give me a girl in your head.

LAZARO: A girl who is kind of a tomboy. She’s kind of rough around the edges, but then she has on her mom’s couture JACKet. She cuts off the sleeves and she wears it with jeans. We love that mix. It doesn’t matter if something is expensive or whether it’s cheap. It’s the relationships between things that works for us. It’s an attitude, a nonchalance. It doesn’t matter if something is a million dollars or whether it’s $2. That doesn’t matter for things to work together. It’s not about saving your special pieces for Sunday.

JACK: You see it in another way in our price points. They have such a range. We have t-shirts for 300 bucks, and a $10,000 dress sometimes, and everything in between. And we want it all thrown together.

INGRID: So, back to fall 2009.

LAZARO: We start with the drabby fabrics that absorb the light, and are enveloping. The narrative is layered.

JACK: There’s a cocooning with coats and JACKets in the beginning, and then it dissolves into deep grays and blue-grays.

INGRID: Again, it looked like you guys were hitting the zeitgeist. The clothes themselves seemed to say, “Keep yourself warm, wear materials that aren’t going to burn out in one season.” They had real beauty and gravitas.

JACK: We started with the question of what did we originally stand for? We looked at our first show, as a kind of reference point.

LAZARO: This is one of the only collections where we sat down with pens and paper and didn’t really have inspiration images. We just drew.

JACK: We had the girl in mind, and we delved into the fabrics and tweeds. It started out with a lot of textures and went from there.

INGRID: The last passages were evocative of the graphs of the stock market, or of lightning hitting. Was it the lightning of “things have to change,” which is what we were hearing everywhere? The world couldn’t go on like that. People couldn’t keep being that greedy without tremendous cost, which the world is now paying for. Those are some of the things that went through my mind when I was at your show. I also thought about Clyfford Still, the Abstract Expressionist painter who died in the early ’80s.

But let’s start circling back to where we started. Let’s go back to your recent trip to Tahiti, before you began to design spring 2010. Just say what comes to mind.

LAZARO: Fighting the currents.

INGRID: Having your own island? Having the fashion be the customer’s escape.

LAZARO: Totally. You know, we’re growing up and we’re going through life and experiencing all these different things. It is very much a creative process. We can’t help but be influenced by our experiences. This spring we went to Tahiti. How can you not take that in? How can we not be inspired, by going to Gauguin’s house? It’s inevitable. When we are on vacation, the last thing we want to do is go to St. Tropez. We’ve never been to St. Tropez. We don’t want to run into the same people. We want to get away. We bought a farm in Massachusetts.

INGRID: That reminds me. Your fall 2007 collection took me there. I pictured 21st century girls wearing the collection at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in Massachusetts. They seemed to come from that world, but for today. Looking back in your lookbook at 2007, for me it conjured up writers who captured turn-of-the-century American society with such rigor and grace, such as Edith Wharton and Henry James.

JACK: It was definitely a lot of Wharton, and Henry James. His book Washington Square.

LAZARO: That collection was inspired by indoors. It was really internal. We went into this whole psychological thing, and started exploring Rorschachs.

JACK: We wanted a sense of home, an enveloping coziness—

LAZARO: — To get away from New York. We wanted to retreat into an interior world, away from all the stuff, the celebrity madness, into—

JACK: — Privacy and quietness and a quiet luxury.

INGRID: So the clothes become your journeys—physical, psychological, and emotional.

JACK: There are so many interesting worlds we want to explore. There are so many other things we’d love to do, actually besides fashion, but we figure out a way to incorporate that into our collections.

INGRID: We’ve touched on art quite a bit in this interview. Obviously it is a true interest of both of yours. But clearly you’re not trying to make arty fashion. When I look at your collections, I don’t think, “Oh, these guys want to be artists, they don’t want to be designers.”

JACK: Right.

INGRID: It feels as though you’re in love with the subject of fashion. But that art helps to drive you.

JACK: Definitely. You see so much texture and life in the art world.

LAZARO: It’s a freedom.

Sischy: Speaking of freedom—it’s time for me to let you go. I’ve only got two quick questions left. One, now that you’ve been in the fashion world for a while, what surprised you the most about it?

JACK: I’m surprised I can remove myself from it now and again. In the beginning that was not possible. It was such an incredible world, so inspiring, with all these people, and characters. Now we can really step away from it a lot more often, and not feeling like we are missing out on anything. It’s a good place I think to be, to be able to separate.

LAZARO: I see it as the Wizard of Oz thing. Coming into it in the first couple of years was like being Dorothy talking to the wizard. After a few years, you get to see what the wizard really is. So the older you get, the more you have your friends who you respect, and the people you admire, and –

JACK: — You find your path as to what is important to you and what you can do. I think we’re getting to that point.

INGRID: My last question—when you walk in this room, where you both work, and where we’ve been allowed to talk about fashion—

Lazaro and Jack [LAUGHS]

INGRID: What is it that inspires you?

JACK: Each other.

LAZARO: Yeah!