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Today’s Botter show began with a trio of bare-chested guys carrying fake fur-covered plastic lawn chairs on their shoulders. Backstage Lisi Herrebrugh and Rushemy Botter explained that the chairs are common sights in the Caribbean. “People look at these chairs as just trash, but in a culture where we’re from it’s a chair you go to church on,” Botter said. They named the show Caribbean Couture after the ways in which people in those island countries turn themselves out with inventiveness and “abundant style” despite their “refrigerators being empty.”

The Botter designers recently ended a three-year creative directorship at Nina Ricci. That appointment came as a surprise. They hadn’t shown a collection on the Paris runway before they got the gig. In the end, it raised their profile and their skill set, but it was a distraction from their work at Botter. These are designers with a strong point of view about upcycling and an original approach to creating special pieces from what others might consider junk. A friend in the front row wore a black baseball cap embellished with bright yellow plastic tags.

Their long-held concern for the environment led them to Parley for the Oceans last season. Here, they used beads made from recycled ocean plastic as decorative elements, fringing the front of an apron dress and weaving them into an argyle motif on a polo. Elsewhere, they fashioned a blouson jacket out of a pair of trousers and a striped rugby shirt out of fabric scraps. Their more straightforward tailoring came in bright underwater colors of the kind associated with coral beds and tropical fish, many of which are now in decline.

“We’re facing so many climate issues, the war that’s going on in Ukraine; it’s a very scary time now, but we just try to find a positive mindset,” Herrebrugh said. The idea being that inventiveness can inspire change. In case you missed the point, they spelled it out on the back of a western-style button-down: the beaded fringe read No War.