Robert Rodriguez is leading a new era for Derek Lam as its Creative Director through a reimagined vision of a New York woman.<\/p>\n
Derek Lam<\/p>\n
Like most fashion people in August, Robert Rodriguez isn\u2019t frolicking on the Med. On this end-of-summer afternoon, he\u2019s in his New York City office prepping for the fall shows. The designer is set to present the second season of his vision for Derek Lam, the line whose voice was loud in defining 2000s New York\u2019s fashion with its constructed-but-unfussed look. <\/p>\n
He\u2019s been the Creative Director since the end of 2025, after Lam sold the entire brand and its assets to Public Clothing Company (PCC) in 2020. Lam himself exited the company entirely in 2023 after staying on as Chief Creative Officer for a few years after the sale. <\/p>\n
And as PCC\u2019s repositioning strategy is now very much in play, it’s calling on the thing that most brands with new Creative Directors hang their hats on: DNA. <\/p>\n
The obvious nods are there. In Rodriguez\u2019s first collection, he showed architecture, minimalism, warm tones, inspired construction, and a touch of edge to create an idea of modern casual that eschews Gen-Z\u2019s baggy trousers and baby-tees for something with real tailoring. They\u2019re clothes that hold true shape and that are built upon instead of merely put on.<\/p>\n
Because in Rodriguez\u2019s world, to be chic and to be casual is the definition of cool. <\/p>\n
\u201cI love fitting. I love textiles. And great design is great design, and I fit it all into this feeling of coolness in sportswear,\u201d says Rodriguez. <\/p>\n
\u201cEvery garment should have purpose, longevity, and emotional value to it, and I think that\u2019s what American fashion should be.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
Robert Rodriguez<\/p>\n
While both Lam and Rodriguez\u2019s careers started decades apart, there are uncanny matches between their paths. Though they share similar footprints, it\u2019s also interesting to see the opposite roads they took to converge on the same brand. <\/p>\n
Both grew up in American garment manufacturing families started by their immigrant parents or grandparents. They are both bonded by a shared geographical history; the first place Rodriguez lived when his parents emigrated to the US from Cuba when he was 5 was in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the same place where Lam\u2019s family\u2019s factories were based. <\/p>\n
\u201cI was the only Cuban,\u201d Rodriguez reminisces. \u201cI didn’t speak the languages, Cantonese or English, I only spoke Spanish.\u201d Rodriguez\u2019s family relocated to Miami 7 years later. <\/p>\n
They both hold design degrees from esteemed New York institutions, Rodriguez from FIT (he graduated in its golden era circa the Nina Garcia days) while Lam is a Parsons alum. They came up under luxury designer behemoths before diving into commercial projects at sportswear-oriented brands, and helmed major houses along the way\u2013Rodriguez as Creative Director of Halston, and Lam in the same position at Tod\u2019s.<\/p>\n
Robert Rodriguez is recognized as one of fashion’s respected design talents. Having been hired at Christian Dior right out of college, he has helmed labels such as Halston, where he brought the house back to the Met Gala for the first time since in decades in 2021.<\/p>\n
Derek Lam<\/p>\n
Rodriguez believes casual clothing should be chic through construction, architecture and tailoring.<\/p>\n
Derek Lam<\/p>\n
Architecture runs deep in both designers\u2019 work. Rodriguez developed his love for it through exposure from his father\u2019s real estate development business, and Lam\u2019s archive is an array of direct references to his love of architecture, such as the spring 2012 collection <\/a>based on Richard Neutra\u2019s most famous home, the Kaufmann Desert House. Lam\u2019s SOHO store, void of walls and shaped with curved acrylic partitions<\/a> instead, utilized architecture to create a container for clothes. <\/p>\n \u201cI love shapes, and that\u2019s why I love architecture because for me, designing clothing is like designing a building, it\u2019s always about shape, right?\u201d says Rodriguez. <\/p>\n With similar blueprints, it should hardly come as a surprise that their design vocabulary shares some of the same words\u2013tailored, elegant, construction-heavy, detailed. But their careers were born of opposite training grounds. <\/p>\n \u201cI think that women in New York have changed.\u201d\n<\/p>\n Robert Rodriguez<\/p>\n Rodriguez cut his teeth at Christian Dior, and as he tells it, the job “wasn\u2019t commercial, it was about fantasy and expressing myself however I wanted\u201d, through gowns, embellishment, and technique for technique\u2019s sake. It was later, as Creative Director of Laundry by Shelli Segal, which he touts as the \u201cfirst pioneer of contemporary\u201d, that he learned to combine artistic freedom with commercial sensibility. <\/p>\n “Ballgown skirt? Of course. Girls love ballgown skirts.\u201d That\u2019s Rodriguez describing the moment he figured out how to mesh Dior-trained fantasy with commercial sportswear by pairing cashmere sweaters with ballgown skirts at Laundry. <\/p>\n But Lam spent his formative years absorbing American sportswear’s pragmatism under the king of it, Michael Kors, a designer whose work was steeped in an exacting, construction-first approach to sportswear, never belittling the category, but rather, elevating it. And yet, it couldn\u2019t be more different than Dior. <\/p>\n The result is two designers who learned to handle restraint. Lam learned it from precision, and Rodriguez through excess. <\/p>\n New York sensibility is the foundation upon which Derek Lam was built and is the basis of Rodriguez’s vision today.<\/p>\n Derek Lam<\/p>\n It seems almost unfair to compare the two, but it\u2019s natural to do when a Creative Director takes over a brand while the namesake is still alive, especially when DNA is called upon to define a brand’s future. Each time this happens\u2013Valentino, Dries Van Noten, Proenza Schouler, and Carolina Herrera had similar takeovers\u2013the reporting<\/a> and reviews read almost like a connect-the-dots of sorts between the outgoing and the incoming creatives. <\/p>\n Here, the connections especially make sense. Of all the strategic decisions the executives at PCC could have taken, including licensing the name or forgoing NYFW runway shows, the path they chose walk is to walk in the footprint Lam created and double down on it. <\/p>\n