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 ardor, I’m revisiting the assumption. “It looks painted, right? Like watercolor—or Rothko, the way the colors 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 cofounder 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 six-inch leather swatch Hernandez rhapsodizes over—whisper-thin strips joined together by this new kind of skiving so they appear as one seamless sueded color-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.
