Proenza Schouler Heads to Paris for Cruise 2017

Photo Credit: Ovidiu Hrubaru / Shutterstock.com

It looks like American designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez won’t be spending their Fourth of July in the US barbecuing burgers and drinking lemonade. This Monday the Proenza Schouler duo will be in Paris presenting their Cruise 2017 collection during Paris Haute Couture Week. With the current trend of fashion shows being shown in exotic locations—Louis Vuitton presented in Brazil, Chanel in Cuba—it makes sense that Proenza is taking their latest runway overseas. The show will be funded by MAC Cosmetics, which has been working with the brand for the last 16 season, and beauty will be led by senior makeup artist Fatima Thomas.

But here’s what makes this show so peculiar: the lineup will be presented to an intimate, hand-selected audience that has agreed to a social media ban. All photos and video will be on an embargo; the entire collection will remain a secret until it hits stores next year. The move goes against the current “see now, buy now” trend that other designers are attempting, but it’s a strategy they believe will pay off in the long run. For Pre-Fall 2016, they did something similar, releasing a campaign video instead of a runway show, and they claim it was a success. “The press that we got from that video was like, 100 times more attention than if we would have just released the images the day we did the presentation in the showroom,” Hernandez told Business of Fashion. “We magnified the presence of the Pre-Fall collection.”