Tumblr as couture: that was the reaction upon seeing the astonishing finale dresses from Proenza Schouler’s S/S13 collection. In a show predicated on the themes of “collage” and “randomness”...
Tumblr as couture: that was the reaction upon seeing the astonishing finale dresses from Proenza Schouler’s S/S13 collection. In a show predicated on the themes of “collage” and “randomness” that seamlessly explored the boundaries between technology and craft; Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez abstracted and remixed found images from Tumblr (of protesters, a swimming pool and a beach) reproducing them onto leather and double satin. The effect was intoxicating: luxurious and cutting-edge cool at the same time, confirming that few designers are as connected to the hum and rhythms of contemporary culture as the Proenza boys. Says artist, Alejandro Cardenas who has created textiles and graphics for the brand since its inception: “What was interesting about the photo prints in that collection was how much work it took to make them work on clothing. I usually create artwork from scratch, but taking a pre-existing image and manipulating it to make sense as clothing took me into photo retouching territory.” He elaborates, “I was removing and adding protesters, erasing large objects, extending skies, adding vegetation. If in the end it seems like we just printed a photo on fabric it means we did it right.”
"What was interesting about the photo prints in the S/S13 collection was how much work it took to make them work on clothing"
Born in Chile, Cardenas was raised in Florida and graduated from The Cooper Union whereupon he was part of the art collective, Lansing-Dreiden. A three month internship at Prada piqued his interest in fashion - “It was the first time I understood that one can build a brand where the clothing and the store and the campaign and the show can all inter-relate to create a narrative that is iterative and evolves over the life of the brand. That idea excited me immensely, since it felt like an entirely new medium.” A friend introduced him to Hernandez and McCollough while they were still students at Parsons. After their entire senior collection was snapped up by Julie Gilhart for Barneys, they asked him to design their logo and “from that point I would help them with whatever they needed – lookbooks, their first website, then prints, then shoes. I was kind of just there designing whatever needed designing.”
Each season he gets a brief of the prints and custom fabrics the boys want, which he initially drafts by hand, before scanning the images and reworking it with Photoshop. Then comes the intense process of refining, selecting and editing, which he terms “problem solving”. Laughing, he admits, “I call it that because a lot of the time I have no idea how to actually do what the guys want and I have to figure it out! Whether it's making artwork that replicates fish or insects, or reproducing the look of fabric printing techniques from the 50s, or creating a convincing airbrushed wolf, it's always a new challenge.”
With their obsessive dedication to pushing forward with fabric research (their latest A/W13 collection boasts “ultrasonic welding” and laser cut leathers no less) his 11-year collaboration with Proenza Schouler is a constant learning curve. “If all we did was silkscreen onto canvas my job would be very boring. I knew nothing about fabric when we started and now I am consistently blown away by how far they are willing to push themselves to make ideas reality. The most inspiring thing about working with Jack and Lazaro is how creative they are and how dedicated they are to their vision. I am almost always surprised when they first show me their direction, and even though I work on it day and night for months, I am equally surprised when I see the collection on the runway.”
An accomplished film artist who’s directed videos for Chairlift and Violens, he’s recently relocated to LA to learn animation in the hopes of making a feature film some day. So consuming is his work for Proenza Schouler though, it can spill over into his more personal activities: the iridescent, fluorescent sea-life forms he created for their S/S10 show found new life in a series of paintings he exhibited for the James Fuentes Gallery. “If I'm in the studio or at the computer there aren't really boundaries in terms of techniques and processes. I don't hold back in either situation, so the only real difference is where it ends up. I don't think about that at all honestly.”
