Cadillac Goes After That Public School Cool in Dubai

Public School’s Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne run around their runway in Dubai after showing their pre-fall 2016 collection. Photo: iMAX TREE

If you popped your head into the XVA Art Gallery Hotel in Old Dubai on Monday afternoon, you’d probably be very confused. Take just three of the tables, for example. One’s filled with fashion editors from Vogue, Elle, W, etc., wearing loose fitting dresses, Maryam Nassir Zadeh sandals, and cross body bags. The other with what you might call menswear influencers, young men peacocking in full suits, hats, jewelry, Gucci slingbacks, despite the 90 degree heat. And then the other hosts dads who write about cars, nearly all wearing khakis, polo shirts, and backpacks. On stage, two of fashion’s current darlings, Public School’s Maxwell Osborne and Dao-Yi Chow, and Andrew Smith, Cadillac’s executive design director, are talking about why in the world we’re all here, nearly 6,283 miles away from Manhattan (or 7,063 from Detroit, if you’re the last table), for two seemingly disparate events: Public School’s pre-fall runway show, and the unveiling of Cadillac’s new car, the XT5.

The official answer is American luxury, a phrase that someone on Cadillac’s marketing team did an excellent job of drilling into the heads of everyone involved. I hear it dozens of times in 24 hours; it’s the thread that links the two brands. Unofficially, the answer is that Cadillac wants cool, and Public School has that in spades. Andrew Lipman, the car brand’s global communications director, told me the CMO loves to throw around the following line: “We’re a luxury brand that happens to sell cars.” Or as Smith puts it, “Vehicles are the core of what we do, but we are building a lifestyle brand.”

A look from Public School’s pre-fall 2016 collection. Photo: Cadillac

In its pursuit of that coveted “lifestyle brand” label, Cadillac is trying to reinvent itself as a patron of the arts, all arts. They sponsored the first ever men’s fashion week in New York this past summer, they’re hosting dinner parties for young creatives in major cities across the US, they will host this weekend’s Summit Series (a sort of summer camp at sea for creative entrepreneurs), and they’ve flown nearly 50 fashion and car people to Dubai to milk all the cool they can from one of fashion’s coolest brands. (They’re also about to work with Jason Wu, and announce a couple of traditional artists with whom they’ll collaborate.)

And Public School is totally fine with sharing their cool, especially if it means they’re one step closer to designing a car for the iconic American brand. “We’d redesign the whole car! Push it all the way, Dubai-style, and see what they allow us to do,” Osborne says when I ask if this partnership might turn into a collaboration. “We’d want something crazy on the road.”

Chow bounced with excitement, “Sneakers and cars are the first thing I remember sketching and designing, so that’d be like a dream come true.” They’ve already visited Detroit, where they were surprised to see how much of the car design process mirrored their own, but both brands are mum on if they’ll ever produce an actual collaboration.

A look from Public School’s pre-fall 2016 collection. Photo: Cadillac

Cool, here, means millennial. “By the year 2024, four out of five luxury consumers are going to be millennials, so absolutely we need to be making sure our partnerships and everything we’re doing is targeting a younger demographic,” Lipman said. It’s a word the media and everyone who’s trying to sell anything is obsessed with, one I can barely stand to type anymore, and one Chow and Osborne have never used. “‘It’s such a weird word, we’ve never heard it before,” Osborne told me. “We just think about people who are progressive thinkers, doesn’t matter if you’re a millennial or from Gen X, it’s all about a state of mind,” Chow added. You might wonder how many millennials can afford Public School’s $400 sweatshirts, but there’s no doubt its founders are surrounded by Cadillac’s dream customer.

After Monday night’s runway show marched around a courtyard between two office buildings in Dubai’s Design District, a gaggle of models partied with familiar fashion faces like Kate Lanphear (Maxim’s former EIC styled the women’s half of the show), Details’ Eugene Tong (same, for the men’s side) Hannah Bronfman, Vashtie Kola, and Nick Wooster, while Mia Moretti played ‘90s classics from Biggie to Nelly.

“It feels good,” Osborne told me after the show when I asked how he felt about someone else hoping to siphon some of their cool. While the baby-faced models were escorted off the premises for being, well, babies, he gave me the most honest answer to the question I’d been asking all day. “These collaborations, whether it’s with a car, or it happens often with liquor, they help either support [emerging designers] in, you know, a monetary way, or help to get your voice heard on a bigger scale, so you’ve got to use it to your advantage.” And if Public School knows anything, it’s how to use corporate sponsorship to their advantage. Their prolific collaborations, with brands like Red Bull, Nike, Tumi, J.Crew, and Oliver Peoples, have netted hundreds of headlines, keeping them in the news between fashion weeks without watering down their brand. Osborne said, “You always gotta find the right one, the one that doesn’t feel forced, this is one of those things that doesn’t feel forced.”