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.

Courtesy of Public School

“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.”