Proenza Schouler and Merit Beauty’s New Collaboration Delivers Great Skin and a Must-Have Bag

Last Saturday, shortly before the white-walled galleries of Phillips auction house moonlighted as a runway, makeup artist Diane Kendal detailed the particulars of Proenza Schouler’s spring 2024 beauty direction. Surprises were not in store. “We’re doing a no-makeup makeup look, enhancing all the girls’ natural features,” she said, ticking through the lineup of Merit Beauty products at hand: Great Skin serum for a healthy radiance, Day Glow highlighter on the cheekbones, Clean Lash mascara applied just at the root of curled lashes. “The usual at Proenza,” she smiled—a vote of approval for designers Lazaro Hernandez and Jack McCollough, faithful stewards of their own good taste. “It’s very authentic to them.”

More than two decades into the label’s run, the Proenza Schouler duo have honed in on an aesthetic driven by the kinds of women they want to celebrate. “You notice them before you notice their personal style,” McCollough says in a post-show call with Hernandez. They offer up a string of examples from their mood boards of late. “Amber Valletta back in the day. Patti Smith. Weyes Blood, who opened the show,” Hernandez says, referring to the musician who also supplied the runway score. Of course Chloë Sevigny, a recurring muse who walked last season; also Sade and “artists Jenny Holzer and even Louise Bourgeois—just these natural beauties, these intelligent women who have this undone quality to them,” McCollough adds.

With today’s debut of the Runway Set—a limited-edition makeup collaboration with Merit—that vision of beauty arrives in one tidy package. Best of all, the package itself is by Proenza Schouler: a chic iteration of Merit’s knotted cosmetic bag, here in reversible black and cloud blue vegan leather.

For Aila Morin, Merit’s founding senior VP of brand, growth, and innovation, partnering with Proenza Schouler was a meeting of the minds. “When we were concepting the brand in 2020, they were all over the mood boards,” she says over Zoom, her incandescent skin a testament to the brand’s serum—one of five products in the set. “Every time I was pulling references, I was really pulling their work. We have this shared sense of effortlessness and wearability that’s in the DNA of both brands.”

The beauty company first began sponsoring Proenza Schouler’s shows in February 2022, seeding a kinship that gave rise to the Runway Set—a name that’s duly earned. Along with the serum, there’s the Clean Lash mascara, a formula that’s “really popular with makeup artists because it gives this feathery lifted look, but it’s not chunky and it also doesn’t kind of steal the show,” says Morin. Merit’s clear lip oil is here, along with Flush Balm—a cream blush that’s “impossible to mess up”—in a versatile brick tone. And for a finishing sweep: Merit’s blending brush, good for erasing the seams of any complexion products.

The entire set launches today, as part of Proenza Schouler’s trunk show on Moda Operandi. By early October, the bag itself will hit Merit’s site, too, as a very covetable bonus for orders over $100. “I have always loved fashion, and I remember growing up when it was unattainable to a certain extent,” Morin says, thrilling at the idea of a high-brow gift-with-purchase. She recalls how the bag design originally grew out of Merit’s aim for less waste: “Could you create something that people would actually reuse and not just toss out?” This two-tone vegan leather version, drawing on Merit’s signature blue, promises to have particular staying power. “It feels very Proenza, in a way,” says Hernandez. “Easy, effortless.”