Sustainability has been the word on everyone’s lips lately. As the fashion industry works to reduce our ecological footprint, brands are taking steps toward going green and creating more eco-conscious offerings that are both fashionable and environmentally friendly.

Eileen Fisher, a longtime champion of sustainable design known for her iconic shapes, has come together with CFDA award-winning designers Dao-Yi Chow and Maxwell Osborne of Public School to create a new sustainable collaboration.

Fisher first met Chow and Osborne at a sustainability conference in Copenhagen almost two years ago. The design duo saw her speak on a panel where she discussed how her brand took clothes back from their customers to create new clothes in the circular design program, Renew. Chow and Osborne’s interests were peaked, so they asked Fisher if they could come see her brand’s factory. Sparks flew and the designers decided they had to do a project together.

The zero-waste Public School x Eileen Fisher collection is comprised of three ready-to-wear designs that are “resewn” and one hat: all pieces are one-of-a-kind. Pieces include a color-blocked silk top, a color-blocked merino sweater, a denim pant, and a felted logo hat. Everything is recycled, including the snaps and buttons.

“This was very fun, and it was interesting because we saw how we both think differently about clothing, but there’s a place we overlap,” Fisher. “The guys were able to find shapes and silhouettes of ours that they wanted to do, even though their styles are a little more complex than ours. Their interest in sustainability is very connected to ours.”

While Public School has always made social movements an integral part of their brand DNA, the path toward sustainability is newer to them. “Sustainability wasn’t a big thing for us from the get-go, although there was always an under current of social consciousness that was always underneath the surface of what we did, but not in relation to sustainability, carbon neutrality, and trying to lessen our footprint on the environment” Chow said. “But, Public School has always been a platform for social consciousness and we deal with a whole bunch of issues.”

This year, Public School moved to doing a “drop” model, where instead of doing the traditional spring/summer and fall/winter designers do, their collections would be distributed in drops. They felt this was an eco-friendlier approach rather than mass producing multiple pieces twice a year.

Although the two brands have very different aesthetics, Chow and Osborne found that a lot of the fluidity and draping work done for the Public School woman worked for Eileen Fisher. “There were certain things that really lent itself to both us and her,” Chow said.

“Their customer is quite different, so when we did this we honestly weren’t thinking much about customers,” Fisher said. “For us it was trying to share what we know about sustainability. When designers are interested in sustainability, we lead them to the Eileen Fisher factory and inspire them. It’s important we all get on sustainability and fast.”

The Public School x Eileen Fisher collection is available at the Making Space store in Brooklyn, and the felted hat is available on publicschoolnyc.com.