Lazaro Hernandez: My skincare routine hasn’t changed since I was 16 years old. It’s still department store stuff, Clinique stuff, things like that. But that’s the age I started caring about my skin. You have a breakout when you’re 15 or something, and you’re like, ‘Ah, what do I do!’ I bought whatever I bought, and it kind of works on me, and I’ve never really had to change from that.

Jack McCollough: I use SK-II. It’s gotten expensive—it didn’t used to be that expensive. I just bought some more toner and it was like $180 bucks for a bottle.

Lazaro: Really? Mine’s like $18.95. [Laughs]

Jack: I started using it years ago. It’s probably not [doing anything], but I’ve convinced myself it does. I moisturize afterwards. I don’t use lotion—I use oil from May Lindstrom. It’s really nice. It’s actually like a serum, but I use it as a moisturizer.

Lazaro: Your skin looks pretty good, now.

Jack: Did I have bad skin?

Lazaro: No, but you’d have little breakouts here and there...

Jack: Yeah, I would get little breakouts once in a while, but I haven’t had a breakout in years. I like that [the May Lindstrom] is all kind of organic materials. The Clinique Three-Step works for Lazaro, but it just feels very alcohol-y, astringent-y, and I like things that are not so harsh on the skin.

Lazaro: I'm pretty low-maintenance. [My routine is that] I get up and take a shower pretty much every morning. I’ll work out sometimes in the morning, two or three times a week. We have a little gym in the house so we use that. I wash my face with that [three-step Clinique]. Then we make ourselves some coffee.

Jack: I’m pretty low maintenance, too. I’ve never been able to find a good shampoo I like—

Lazaro: He’s horrible!

Jack: —and he uses horrible ones. We’re talking like, chemical—

Lazaro. I literally go to Duane Reade and buy all my supplies! [Laughs]

Jack: He loves like, the Head and Shoulders.

Lazaro: I use Head and Shoulders. At 16 I had dandruff, and I did Head and Shoulders and it kind of took it away, and then I never stopped.

Jack: It smells terrible.

Lazaro: I had dry skin and a dry scalp. It’s actually good for me when I don’t wash my face or shampoo every day.

Jack: You have that trick that my mom also does, which works well for you.

Lazaro: I did it last night, actually. Like when you wash your face and then you put Vaseline all over your face.

Jack: My mom’s done it her whole life, and she has great skin.

Lazaro: It’s really good. It just kind of like, seals the moisture in.

Jack: We love a good massage.

Lazaro: I go to Fishion Herb Center on the Lower East Side. It's this hole-in-the-wall guy. He puts a blanket over you and it’s just like [snoring sound].

Jack: You don’t even take your clothes off, do you?

Lazaro: Well yeah, you take your clothes off, but he puts the blanket over you. He just beats you up—like, intense. He walks on you.

Jack: We’re very involved [with the beauty in our runway shows]. It’s like completing the look of the girl—we were working with the clothes all season long, but it’s cool to put the character together in the end. Figure out the casting, and who the woman is, and what her hair looks like, what the beauty is on the face. We usually don’t go very heavy on the makeup—just clean, very natural skin. Every once in a while, we’ll do like a matte lip, or colored hair. Tata Harper worked with us on our last show. Diane [Kendall] does perfect non-makeup makeup.

Lazaro: She’s like, major skin.

Jack: I liked last Spring—Diane did this kind of like elongated eyebrows. She just kind of penciled them in a little longer.

Lazaro: And they were beautiful.

Jack: And it’s those nice little subtle things where it doesn’t look like you’re wearing makeup, but it kind of exaggerates a feature and helps create a character. I’ve always loved makeup.

Lazaro: And it’s always been a dream of ours to do a fragrance. You know, when you’re a designer and you look at the histories of all these major brands—like, you start with high fashion, and you break out and do shoes, and you do bags, and you start to do more democratic kinds of products. One of those steps is definitely fragrance—it appeals to a broader audience. And it gets our message out to a larger consumer base. Also, [there’s] the magic of it. How is a fragrance put together? How do you work on a scent? Who do I work on this with? All of that has been really interesting to us on a creative level. We’ve never done something like this—it’s taken two years for this one thing.

Jack: It was hard because we wanted to get some people’s opinions, but then it’s also dangerous, pulling too many people into the mix. Because then it’s like, ‘I would wear it like this,’ or, ‘I don’t like it like that,’ you know? You can get a little complicated—

Lazaro: We didn’t want anyone’s opinion, actually.

Jack: I mean, thank god we had a bunch of great people on the L’Oréal side that really know fragrance, and a lot of women in those meetings as well. It was great to get their input and their feedback.

Lazaro: I wore it a lot. It was amazing to have it on for a while. For us, we’re not trying to talk about the state of Arizona. It’s more of a state of mind. It was, for us, the idea of the out west, and the idea of escaping and disconnecting, and connecting to things that kind of matter really to yourself. It’s the idea of grounding. It’s an escape, a retreat—the west as a spiritual place, in a way. Arizona was just an interesting word that felt good with Proenza—Proenza, Arizona. We liked that it was a woman’s name. It just sort of represents that idea of escape and going out west, and having connection and all those things. Less of the state.

Jack: We like to get away. I mean, we bought a farm up in the country 10 years ago—up in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts. We go there a lot of weekends to kind of get away and escape, and just unwind, and kind of get back in touch with nature.

Lazaro: Travel.

Jack: We go up there, and we work on collections there as well.

Lazaro: [Relaxing] usually entails getting away from the city.

Jack: We find the city a good place to go to get things done, have meetings, see people. But in terms of our creative process, and just getting back in our heads, escaping is always the best route for us to take.

—as told to ITG

Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez photographed in New York on February 9, 2018.