Proenza Schouler Gives Sailor Stripes a Cool-Girl Makeover
Proenza Schouler, the quintessential downtown label from Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, going strong after more than twenty years, is usually one of the anchors of New York Fashion Week. For this Spring/Summer 2025 season, Proenza Schouler got ahead of the calendar, presenting its collection days before fashion week's official start, a clever move that allowed the industry and the internet to focus on a collection that felt immediately wearable (as in, "I want to wear it now."). A specific clip of the internet's favorite It girl, Devon Lee Carlson, walking in a pair of loose black trousers paired with an oversized white blazer with sharp lapels, spread quickly across social media.
Carlson has long emulated the effortless cool that McCollough and Hernandez have distilled into their brand, and so her modeling for them felt almost predestined.
It also feels like the encapsulation of everything this particular collection was about. It's clothing you see someone wearing while they're pounding the pavement in New York that makes you think to yourself, "I want that." You desire what they're wearing because it's good but also because you have this sneaking suspicion that wearing it will help you become like them. And who doesn't want to possess the uncomplicated crisp chill of a New York It girl wearing Proenza?
In the show notes, Hernandez and McCollough mentioned being inspired by maritime references and floating sail panels. Stripes were a dominant through-line in the collection, but not as we tend to picture them, as horizontal lines across a bateau-neck shirt. They marked asymmetrical tops falling off the shoulders with excess fabric trailing behind models as they walked. They peeked out from tailored cropped blazers, covering collarbones and necks. They adorned the typical large button-down pinched and supersized to look like a dress.
Marinière stripes don't have the same cool cred as other patterns and prints like leopard or tie-dye. But with this collection, Hernandez and McCollough prove they are just as worthy. It's easy to think of navy and white stripes as something inherently French, but Proenza Schoulder have made them feel entirely New York.
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