LIVING PROOF: Public School Builds for an Unpredictable City
The label’s second collection since its return treats modular layers, technical fabric and waterproof galoshes as equipment for daily life
“I think that’s the spirit of New York and us, the resilience and the idea that if you fall down you can get back up and keep trying at getting back to what you love,” Dao-Yi Chow said at the Starrett-Lehigh Building on 10 September, minutes after Public School showed LIVING PROOF.
Resilience is an easy word for a brand to reach for in the season after a comeback. Chow used it to describe something closer to appetite. The label went quiet for seven years and came back to the New York Fashion Week calendar in February with a collection its founders called a homecoming. This one, the second since that return, points forward.
“This is our first love,” Chow said. “This is what we love to do every single day.”
Spring/Summer 2027 asks what a uniform does once school lets out and the education continues anyway. The answer arrived as a wardrobe assembled in parts. Layers open and close, trousers carry a double waistband for stacking, woven shirting meets soft jersey, and the palette holds to navy, black, grey and stone, close enough to the color of the city to function as camouflage inside it. Broad, built-out shoulders return as the house code they have been since the beginning.
Weather ran through everything. Hair was styled windswept, makeup was made to look weathered, a trench carried embellishments shaped like raindrops and waterproof galoshes covered a run of footwear with exaggerated toe springs. The second Allen Edmonds collaboration landed in the same register, a Denzel laceless derby in garment-dyed crust leather and a Russell Longwing in washed black cordovan, both finished to look lived in before anyone puts them on.
Preparation is the design brief. Chow locates the origin of that brief in the city itself. “New York means just being international,” he said. “New York is the city of the world. It’s the center point for all these different ideas and conversations and thoughts and cultures.” A wardrobe built for a place where the weather, the commute and the social register shift several times in a day has to hold up under conditions it cannot forecast.
He framed it as a test the city administers. “If you can be prepared for what New York throws at you, whether it’s the elements or city life, you really can be prepared to go anywhere in the world,” he said. “And that’s what the season is about.”
That logic explains the tailoring and leather sitting among the technical fabric, and the velvet pieces cut into a trompe-l’oeil that reads as a denim set from across the room. The collection keeps its range wide on purpose, because the conditions it dresses for keep changing.
Each collection picks up where the last one stopped. Silhouettes carry forward, tailoring gets tightened, ideas accrue. Refinement is the method and modularity is what it produced this time.
Dao-Yi Chow, Co-founder of PUblic School New York
What has changed in the studio sits in the execution. “We’ve evolved just in terms of our approach,” Chow said. “Not reinventing the wheel every single season—really staying with an idea, evolving it, refining it and not getting off something too quickly.” Each collection picks up where the last one stopped. Silhouettes carry forward, tailoring gets tightened, ideas accrue. Refinement is the method, and modularity is what it produced this time.
The Fall 2026 campaign takes the same position and applies it to how the clothes get seen. Titled “The City Is Mine” and released days before the show, it is the brand’s first advertising campaign since 2017. Joshua Woods, a photographer Chow and co-founder Maxwell Osborne watched come up during the label’s first run, shot it after dark, following Scott Barnhill, MJ Marte and Chow’s 25-year-old son Idriys Ali-Chow through streets, waterfronts and the approaches to the Brooklyn Bridge. Casting Idriys puts the next generation of the family’s New York on camera.
“I think there’s a move back to things that feel a little bit more analog,” Chow said. “You have this really sort of digital fatigue.” Audiences worn down by volume respond to images that ask them to stop, and that’s what they made. Everything was shot on film. The choices inside the frame follow the same logic, from the cars to the ordinary touch points of city life, each one a piece of New York that exists in physical space.
“We wanted to do a real campaign,” Chow said. “Harking back to the days where brands did really real, bigger campaigns that featured a still image and print as opposed to doing 15-second cutdowns of a video.” The reference point is a pre-platform era of fashion advertising, when a campaign meant a photograph a reader encountered once, at scale, on a page. Film enforces the pace that idea requires. Shots are finite, results arrive later, and the process holds everyone to the speed of the medium. Slowness becomes the format.
The crowd at Starrett-Lehigh ran across sport, music and design, the cross-section Public School has always drawn and the clearest evidence that seven years away cost the label very little. Chow wore a custom PSNY jacket set with Kay Jewelers diamonds.
LIVING PROOF treats New York as training. The city is the hardest version of the conditions and a wardrobe that survives it travels anywhere else.
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