In what is sure to set off a chain reaction of fashion events, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler have announced today that they are leaving their brand. The design duo founded the label back in 2002 and have acted as co-creative directors since then, amassing a cult-like following on the New York fashion scene and beyond. The pair will remain in post until January 31 while the company searches for a “new creative lead” (or leads?).

“The time feels right to make the personal decision to step down from our day-to-day leadership role at the company and hand over the creative reins to someone new,” Hernandez told WWD this afternoon. “We have always valued risk-taking and a sense of adventure and feel ready to open ourselves up for whatever comes next.”

“While change is never easy, this decision – one we’ve carefully considered – feels like the right step at the right time, at this stage in our lives,” added McCollough.

“We’ve had many chapters with Proenza Schouler, from our early days when having a brand felt like a fun, possibly temporary, stage in our lives, to later when things started to become more serious, and we realized that a real business was taking shape,” the duo continued. “We didn’t have a specific goal in mind when we started the company, it was merely a way to continue making the clothes that we believed in. Somewhere along the way, it became a real business with real responsibilities.”

Over the course of two decades, McCollough and Hernandez’s brand has become synonymous with a kind of bottled New York cool, sported by perennial It-girl Chloë Sevigny and shifting from technical, sports-coded fabrics in its early days to wearable elegant pieces as it grew up.

Rumours have long been swirling that the next stage of that growth would be taking up a co-creative director position at Loewe, leaving Jonathan Anderson to take the mantle at Dior, and Maria Grazia Chiuri a free agent. While this course of events is only conjecture, McCollough and Hernandez’s exit could set the wheels in motion for a renewed bout of creative director musical chairs in 2025 – so watch this space.