Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s spring 2021 Proenza Schouler collection is shipping to stores this month. The designers report that the season’s top performer so far is a stretch jersey long-sleeved maxi dress with gathered cutouts on the bodice. “It’s the more dressed-up things that are selling,” Hernandez said on a Zoom call, with some surprise. A year into the coronavirus crisis, many of us are still living circumscribed lives. Counterintuitively, that may be why women responded to that sexy, body-conscious piece.
Pre-fall, McCollough explained, “celebrates the joy of dressing up, while injecting a strong sense of ease.”
After a couple of years of more minimal collections, they opted for a craftier attitude here. A halter dress in fine gauge crochet with graphic stripes tracing the neckline captures the vibe. Other hands-on touches include the deep lengths of fringe on knit skirts and asymmetrically placed mismatched buttons on closely fitted, unstructured blazers worn with puddling bell-bottom pants.
McCollough and Hernandez used a gold chain to gather the hem of a dress to its midriff, looping the fabric through hoops to create a decorative slimming detail at the waist.
In a normal year, these dresses would be destined for summer weddings and other special occasions. Nobody knows if those dates will hold, if the vaccine will be widely available by then or if we’ll still be waiting. That’s a lot of uncertainty to wrestle with. Not unlike spring’s body-con cutout number, pre-fall’s cerulean blue tank dress with asymmetric straps could be the hit of optimism we need.