On target; Proenza Schouler shoots to thrill as the latest label to team up with Target, selling New York fashion at Minnesota prices.

Byline: Robert Sullivan

Aside from being full of beauty, the world is a cruel place, and one of the ways that the world is cruel has to do with fashion, especially high fashion. This is well known not just to laypeople but to fashion designers, especially young fashion designers, those people who were until very recently fashion laypeople-and in many cases still have friends who are fashion laypeople looking for great things at prices that won't preclude their paying the rent. "When you are a designer," says Lazaro Hernandez, one half of Proenza Schouler, "your friends from back home call and they say, 'Make me a pair of pants!'_"

Up until now, Proenza Schouler's pants-and dresses and skirts and trademark sculpture bustiers-have been as critically acclaimed as they were unattainable by their creators' still-in-their-20s friends, the musicians, artists, and writers who are successful but not necessarily on the rocketship ride to success that Hernandez and his partner, Jack McCollough, are on. Now things are about to change. Now Proenza Schouler is next in line as guest designer at Target (hitting the shelves in February). For Target, this is only the latest example of its now-regular low-cost

high-fashion campaigns, in which they take designers whom people five miles from the Bryant Park fashion tents haven't necessarily heard of and attempt to make them faraway household names, if just for a few minutes and a few racks inside the 1,500 Target stores. For Jack and Lazaro, it's as much about marketing and prestige as finally making that pair of pants.

"It's just cool to make something," says Lazaro, "that your friends can actually buy."

"And to just be able to reach a young audience," says Jack, "and a more mass audience. I mean, our clothes are for a very specialized customer in a very specialized market, and to be able to make a dent in, well, the American people."

Most likely, they will make a dent. Luella Bartley made a dent with that tartan dress that sold at Target. Paul & Joe dented with that excellent corduroy blazer, and then came Behnaz Sarafpour's dent. As part of Target's