In Dubai, you can go skiing on real snow indoors at Ski Dubai, where the temperature is set at a cool 24 degrees (just outside, it's a face-melting 95 degrees). You can also take a selfie (for $80) from the 148th floor observation deck atop the world's tallest building — the Burj Khalifa. Buildings in Dubai have helipads that rival Iron Man’s Avengers Tower; every retailer imaginable has an outpost in the Dubai Mall (the largest in the world), and the women shopping there, covered from head-to-toe in black abayas, carry handbags that cost at least five figures. Dubai represents wealth in the most gilded, most Disney-fied way: It’s wealth described by owning things that are obviously expensive, it's ostentatious and designed for a kind of person who lives an air-conditioned, private-car-enabled, Black Amex-slinging life. It's luxury defined by having so much money that the rules (of logic, common sense, or propriety) don’t apply to you.

But for many young people, that definition of luxury is no longer compelling. “For us, it’s all about convenience,” says Dao-Yi Chow, one of the two designers of Public School. “It’s about making your life easier, and the idea of ease and effortlessness.” Chow and Maxwell Osbourne’s womenswear label is two years old, and has made waves within the fashion industry for its streetwear-meets-high-fashion aesthetic that is meant to embody the quintessential New York girl. For Public School, luxury means perfectly fitting drop-crotch crepe sweatpants and a boxy cotton button-down that make you look like the cool one at work and the cool one at the bar. For their customer, too, luxury is not rhinestone embellishment and exotic leathers, or car-to-couch heels she can’t actually wear. So it was an interesting choice for Public School to show its pre-fall collection in Dubai.