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Public School Spring 2016 Ready-To-Wear NYFW
from Vogue.com
NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 13, 2015
by MAYA SINGER
The pressure’s on for Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne. The Public School designers unveil their debut collection for DKNY in a few days’ time, and it was reasonable to expect that the duo’s need to deliver for their new corporate masters would result in a Public School show that looked, well, distracted. Instead, Chow and Osborne’s DKNY assignment seems to have prompted them to think even harder about Public School, and how to bring the brand’s clothes a real sense of elevation.

A sophisticated tone was set with the first pair of looks, two streetwise yet soigné ensembles that featured terrific, softly pleated palazzo pants. Here, at last, was the payoff for all the effort Chow and Osborne have put in the past few seasons to bring more dimension and fluidity to their women’s looks. And indeed, the highlights of this collection found them exploring dimension and fluidity with a fresh sense of fluency. Those qualities were there in spades in, for instance, a chic belted gilet of sand-toned raffia, multiple parachute-inspired coats, and the silky maxi dresses that read as a sporty take on that lean Haider Ackermann silhouette. The latter looks didn’t read as derivative. They did, however, feel grown up.

Chow and Osborne said after the show that they were imagining the Public School girl gone abroad, on far-flung travels seeking to find herself. That’s a grab bag of a concept, one that invites a lot of drift, and where Chow and Osborne faltered here was in the looks that digressed from the collection’s overarching urban-nomad vibe. A tennis sweater–esque knit dress, for instance, seemed out of sync with the rest of the show; ditto the sculpted wrap skirts and button-downs with graphic contrast piping. The designers weren’t wrong to want to interrupt the parade of diaphanous looks with something a little sharper, but they did that to better effect when they introduced, say, slender ribbed tunics with tonal horizontal stripes. Those pieces expressed the signature Public School geometry, but elegantly and with understatement. If that’s what comes of turning up the pressure on Osborne and Chow—bring it on.

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