You left the brand shortly after the designer passed away, after both having risen up in the ranks and building strong reputations within the house. How do you decide when it’s a good time to move on from a job?

LK: "We loved working there, but we both knew it’s not our DNA — we’re not Oscar. I told Fernando that we needed to figure out who we are before we get too old. We actually interviewed in a lot of different places, but we didn’t feel like leaving Oscar for that. Why would you leave a job that you love for something that’s just okay?"

What kind of questions were you asking yourselves when you began thinking of leaving your steady jobs to strike it out on your own?

FG: "It was a risk. Laura was a lot more confident than I was because of her experience. However, we went about it intelligently. Laura developed a business plan for three years, to know how much we were going to spend, hypothetically, every single day. We spent much more, but we made much more than that. That gave us the ground to start from. We bought affordable fabrics and were careful to make things we knew would be sellable and exciting. We grew from there and took it day by day."

There's a lot of considerations when you're running your own business that don't exactly come up during the design process. How did you go about learning the ins and outs of building a company when you're used to the creative work?

FG: "[De la Renta] always approached the runway as a business. It wasn’t a fantasy, in the most respectful way — he wanted every single thing on that runway to sell. We never thought of [Monse] as being something no one would ever wear. So we applied the idea of the real woman and making money off of the clothes every single time. We had that training [from de la Renta], too, to be a proper merchandiser when you’re designing or to think about the budget of the year so you’re not killing it on one collection and you can’t spend on the next one. All those things were always in the back of our minds — Laura, especially, but myself, too."

Do you think that "business-first" perspective is often lacking in fashion?

FG: "I kept looking at magazines when I was growing up [that featured] these houses with endless budgets, like Alexander McQueen and Nicolas Ghesquière at Balenciaga — those were the people I looked up to when I was thinking of joining the industry. So I walked into Oscar thinking it was this dreamland of draping and cutting and spending endless amounts of money."

LK: "Oscar was very smart about development costs, because it was his own money."

FG: "And he taught me that — and grounded me — immediately. That’s something I wish every single student went through, because it keeps you alive if your business is afloat."

LK: "You can really burn so much money from development, because you’re just being an artist, but by the next season, you don’t have the budget to do that. Then, your CEO comes in and stares at you the whole season."

FG: "There’s nothing more embarrassing in today’s world than seeing a designer fired because they couldn’t figure out how to sell clothes. That’s something that I’m proud both Laura and I learned not to do."