As the winner of the top prize for this year’s CFDA + Lexus Fashion Initiative, Public School’s Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne are ready to accelerate a sustainability-friendly plan that was months in the making.
Despite sustainability being an industry buzzword in design studios and board rooms, there is considerable work needed for circularity. Public School’s Chow said, “I think everyone’s best intentions are there. But until we can have some kind of institutional knowledge and practice for it, it still feels really segmented. Everyone is really wanting to do their part — what’s specific to their business. It doesn’t feel like there’s any momentum ever. And maybe that’s what change is,” he said.
One lesson Reese has learned through the initiative is “that you definitely have to partner and collaborate in order to be successful. That’s not something I have always been good at. I hate the term ‘using connections,’” she said. “I think it’s more about gaining friends who are like-minded and collaborating on ways to affect positive change.”
All too familiar with media reports of “how the wholesale model is crumbling with every season, bringing deeper discounts, longer sales seasons, excess inventory and waste that is part of the system,” Abasi Rosborough’s founders decided that virtual design could be a solution.
Abdul Abasi said, “Essentially, it will be more like a tech company where we are more about integrating design efficiencies using a computer. What we want to create is to have a vertical business model. We will have laser-cutters in our office so that we can transfer the physical patterns into digital patterns very rapidly. So we would be cutting out a lot of the processes that we use now to save resources, time, human effort and cost.