This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.
On Wednesday night of New York Fashion Week, Public School returned to the runway after a seven-year hiatus. Just before the show got underway, Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne—the homegrown NYC brand’s founders and designers—remarked that they were feeling surprisingly calm. “I guess that's what you get for being old, being the OGs,” Chow joked.
It’s hard to overstate how big of a deal Public School was in a certain era of 2010s men’s fashion. Chow and Osborne, who met at Sean John in the aughts, were clothes-obsessed and stylish, and they made gear for the emerging street-style Tumblr economy, fusing the casually layered sensibility of NYC streetwear with avant-garde influences from European designers like Raf Simons.
This fit-pic-forward aesthetic struck a chord, and Public School got picked up by just about every important department store, and the well-liked Chow and Osborne hoovered up industry accolades, winning the 2013 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, the 2014 CFDA menswear prize, and the 2015 international Woolmark Prize, among others. They released a series of red-hot Jordan collaborations and did a stint as creative directors of DKNY when it was still owned by LVMH. Chow and Osborne were the next-gen faces of men’s fashion in the city where they came up (“Public School” is a nod to their NYC educations).
And then around 2018, Public School quietly closed its doors. There was no formal announcement or dramatic blowup. As was the case for many men’s brands of that time, the business simply didn’t match the hype. Fashion moved on, and Chow and Osborne spun out to other creative projects.
But the duo evidently did not move on entirely. “It felt like a matter of when we were going to come back and show,” Osborne said backstage. They explained the decision to relaunch in 2026 as an instinctual or political one, rather than a new business case.
“There’s an urgency to the times that we’re living in,” said Chow, whose T-shirt bore a logo for the “U.S. Department of Homeland Insecurity.” “You open your phone, some crazy shit is always happening. And so this is really about, what do we want to wear now? And we wanted to make sure that you felt that sort of urgency and intentionality and resilience and resistance as only you would feel here being here in New York City.”
Speaking of the times we’re living in: Chow and Maxwell have launched a Public School Substack where they promise to document the rebuilding process. But there were elements of the reboot that felt fascinatingly nostalgic. I never attended a Public School show during the label’s glory days, but I imagine it would have felt similar to the scene on Wednesday night, where 1 OAK rainmaker Richie Akiva’s phone was blowing up in the front row and “Losing My Edge” carried the show soundtrack. Many models wore Nike ACG boots customized with closures lifted from the #menswear staple double-monkstrap derbies.
The clothes, however, felt refreshingly current. There was nothing revolutionary, besides the models’ black Gigi Burris berets, dark Moscot sunglasses, and fingerless black leather gloves. (“They’re going to war, but they’re going to war in style,” Chow noted.) But there were plenty of garments that struck a timely balance of easy formality. You could picture the Public School customer, a bit older and wiser, salivating over a cropped, wide-shouldered wool blazer, or any of the several leather hoodies and anoraks. Or perhaps the kimono-like wool blouson, or the banker button-up shirt that Chow and Maxwell inverted, giving it a blue collar rather than white.
Of course, there are mountains of smart clothes out there right now, especially for the streetwear graduate seeking out a more polished—but no less leisurely—wardrobe. The spark that Public School had back in the day was it felt like Chow and Maxwell were tapping into unexplored style territory. The new Public School is wearable and now, but what will Chow and Maxwell do to re-establish themselves as the arbiters of what’s next?
Speaking backstage, Chow said, “We don't know what's going to happen a year from now, two months from now, tomorrow.” He was speaking of our unsettled current moment, but he might as well have been previewing where they’re planning to go from here.