Behind the scenes with the New York designers ahead of their SS17 show.

New York City is stitched into the very fabric of Public School – both literally and figuratively. All of its clothing labels say “New York” and its entire aesthetic and ethos is reflective of it.

The brand’s founders and codesigners Messrs Dao-Yi Chow, 42 and Maxwell Osborne, 34, were born, raised and schooled here. Although eight years apart, they grew up with similar references and the same obsession with hip-hop and sports, especially basketball – they are both big New York Knicks fans. And about once a month, you’ll still find them shooting hoops with friends in the gym at a West Village (public) school, where Mr Osborne was once a student.

The CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) Award-winning designers roll their eyes at the mention of “athleisure”, but they were pioneers in tailored sportswear, bringing street references into sophisticated fashion design, converging the low with the high, dressing down with dressing up. For years, American menswear had been dominated by variations on the well-worn themes of preppy and heritage. It hit a saturation point. “The Public School aesthetic came at the right time, because guys were figuring out that perhaps dressing like an Italian every day wasn’t necessarily the look they wanted to do,” says Mr Eugene Tong, the brand’s influential stylist and “unofficial third member”.

Messrs Chow and Osborne are the embodiment of their largely monochromatic brand. They often sit in the window at Joe’s Pizza, a local favourite, to get a slice of New York life. “Our inspiration comes from real people,” says Mr Osborne, a single dreadlock falling down in front of his signature prescription sunglasses. “The mantra for Public School is ‘finding perfection in imperfection’. You walk down the street and see beauty and its beasts on one block. You get the pretty and you get the ugly side by side, and that’s what makes the city so great.” Mr Chow concurs. “I guess if a city can be your muse, then New York City certainly is ours,” he says. “It’s really rough around the edges, but you find so much happening. There’s this restless energy about it that we really draw our inspiration from.”

To paraphrase Mr Frank Sinatra, if you can make it here, you’ll make it anywhere. For a while it didn’t look like Public School was going to make it at all. Having grown too fast too quickly, they closed the brand down in 2010 to refocus, and when they brought it back in 2012 after two years in the CFDA Fashion Incubator program, they decided to bring all production to New York’s Garment District in order to ensure creative and quality control. “Being ‘Made in New York’ is a big deal for us,” says Mr Osborne. “In a four-block radius, you can visit about six of our factories and [so we can] really oversee everything that we’re working on.”

Mr Chow’s signature is a black, backwards snapback featuring the acronym WNL which stands for “we need leaders” and also “when no-one’s looking”. These mantras formed the politically-charged message in Public School’s latest catwalk show, set in an imagined post-Trumpian apocalypse. “WNL is a call to action for people to step up now,” says Mr Chow. “It’s about being leaders not followers, and it’s also about how you act when no one’s looking. Are you someone that people can look up to?”

MR PORTER spent a crucial 24 hours shadowing the pair as they put the finishing flourishes to their show before attending the CFDA Awards – “the Oscars of American fashion” – for which they were once again nominated for menswear designers of the year. Keep a look out for some notable cameos in our film, above, as the basketball theme comes full circle. Then shop their latest collection, below, which arrived on MR PORTER this week.

Shop the whole Public School collection here