Brandon Maxwell Is Letting The Clothes Do The Talking

There is a moment in the midst of my Zoom chat with Brandon Maxwell when I find myself snorting with laughter as both of us wildly gesticulate at our screens. Really, it’s worthless for me to articulate what was so funny; it was the kind of giggly “you had to be there to understand” situation one would have with close friends. The interaction, in fact, was so wonderfully relaxed that for a moment I completely forgot that I was having it with someone I had only interviewed twice — and neither time in real life. But that’s just part of Maxwell’s ineffable charm: He’s the type of person who thrives on interactions with others, who will immediately find a point of connection if it is there. It’s a trait that, for often better and occasionally worse, has helped shape his career.

“I'm naturally a person who talks to everyone,” the designer tells me on our call. It’s mid-afternoon on a Monday and we are both a little bleary (him from flu recovery, me from a post-lunch nap) as he considers the best way to explain recent changes within his collection. Lately the clothes have shifted towards a smart, sharp, and streamlined approach to wardrobe dressing versus some of the red carpet-specific bravado within his earlier work — and, as is so often the case with his deeply personal designs, the story behind the garments runs far deeper than just silhouette and fabric choices. The best place to start, he tells me, would be early in 2020, the beginning of well… you know.

“I think if you look at my career, sort of my biggest time was right before the pandemic,” muses Maxwell. As someone who was working at a major glossy magazine at the time, I instantly understand what he is trying to say. Still riding the high off of his critically acclaimed 2015 debut, the creative’s show had become one of New York Fashion Week’s most talked about events. Take the Spring 2019 season, an ode to Texan style, which boasted a hot pink runway, twinkle lights, and a real car; for Fall 2020, he invited the stars of the Netflix hit Cheer to hype the models as they walked a runway at Museum Of Natural History’s Hall Of North American Mammals.

From my little corner of industry, Maxwell’s ascent looked like the stuff of fashion fairy tales: boy from the small town of Longview, Texas moves to New York City with a degree in photography and a dream to make beautiful things. He lands an internship with the legendary stylist Deborah Afshani, which ultimately turns into an assistant gig with Nicola Formichetti at the peak of his tenure dressing Lady Gaga. Fast forward past a certain meat dress situation (you know the one) and his debut show at the historic Mr. Chow restaurant, and suddenly Maxwell had found himself at the helm of the style zeitgeist. “It was actually incredibly overwhelming for me,” he says, explaining how easy it can be to get sucked into that kind of attention spiral, the way it can not only pull your focus away from creative endeavors but also foster a deep-seated sense of insecurity. Nothing, after all, makes you fear the loss of validation like believing you don’t deserve it in the first place.

But those lost years in lockdown deeply impacted Maxwell and the way he wanted to move through the world. Like all of us, he found being stuck at home didn’t insulate him from hard life changes. And when he re-emerged from that period, there was more to process than the mere mind-screw of re-entering IRL society. “In 2023 and [early] 2024, I didn't give interviews, I didn't really go to things, because the truth of the matter is I was going through some of the most devastating — but also the some of the greatest — times in my life,” the designer tells me reflectively. This was an era of tremendous professional growth as he fully settled into his roles as a judge on the rebooted Project Runway and the Creative Director for Walmart’s Free Assembly and Scoop brands (he joined these teams in 2018 and 2021, respectively). Yet it was also one of deep introspection as he dealt with personal struggles, including the declining health of his late father, who he lost earlier this year.

“Although I had built a career out of talking about my family and about my friends and all my life, all of a sudden when real things were happening, I felt like that should not be for public consumption,” Maxwell tells me. And thus, a few seasons ago he wiped his company’s Instagram clean and began anew with beautiful imagery of his latest two collections. He feels that these have unconsciously evolved in a “softer, more grown-up” direction as a result of sharing less with the world. “I started to ask myself, ‘What's really important to me? And who am I?’ And I think ultimately, I wanted my work to speak for itself.”

There’s no arguing that it does. Maxwell’s Spring 2024 show, an intimate 100 guest affair, served as something of a palette cleanser for the label: There were fluid, second-skin maxi dresses in warm spice tones that subtly shimmied as the models walked down the runway, and brilliantly thought through black layers — long leather tops with matching trousers, sheer dresses atop bodysuits — that hugged the body in all the right places. His fall presentation, although shown in a much larger venue to a bigger crowd, picked right up where the last catwalk left off with equally clean tailoring (elegant scarf coats, nipped waist blazers) and sensually draped shapes (silky column dresses, tunic tops that pour over, rather than cling to, one’s curves).

The sets for both events were in conversation with each other, whether the audience realized it or not. “If it wasn't obvious, the very first one [reflected] that I had just found out I was losing a parent,” says Maxwell, pointing to the small all-white venue and limited attendance as signs of his contemplative mood. “The second one was literally a 150 feet tall [space] built to look like heaven with smoke coming out of it.” He thoughtfully compares and contrasts these solemn occasions to his very first few seasons on the New York Fashion Week calendar, which he remembers as a glamorous blur of late nights full of champagne and twirling models. “I think that I was really purposeful about working through what I was going through in a very constructive, adult, beautiful, and positive way, which was not always my nature in the early years of my career. Those shows will go down for me as two of the most important, if not the most important, ones that I’ve done.”

Of course, there will still always be a few constants in the sartorial universe of Brandon Maxwell. “There’s the obvious, which is that [the model is] not coming out in a slipper and we can always find her waist,” he tells me with a smile. “And I think that that’s generally an overall sense of minimalism with a slight twist to it.” But above all else he always aims to create clothes that his customers will connect with on a personal level, the sort of styles they’ll rely on to feel more like themselves. He wants to make pieces that, because they’re worn so often, are inherently imbued with the best stories of one’s life.

After floating around the high fashion scene for over a decade, Maxwell naturally has plenty of memorable anecdotes himself — he puts meeting Oprah, a childhood hero of his, at the top of the list — as well as a who’s who Rolex of industry luminaries he counts as friends. He also has a who’s who of Hollywood It girls and established A-listers alike lining up to wear his looks; he counts Laura Harrier, Gabrielle Union, and America Ferrera as a few of his recent clients.

Maxwell’s close confidant and professional contemporary Aurora James can attest to his far-reaching fan club — she’s a proud member. “Brandon has an extraordinary way of designing that allows women of all ages and shapes to feel confident in his clothes,” the Brother Vellies founder and Fifteen Percent Pledge vice president tells TZR. “He puts women first, he listens to us, and he understands how his customers hope to feel when getting dressed.” Moreover, she continues, he has a way of translating his singular experience as a Southern boy from a big Texan family to something that’ll resonate with most anyone. “Brandon’s Texas roots collide with New York in a way that feels frictionless. He is so authentically himself but also makes spaces for his customers to come into his world.”

Much of that space is occupied and influenced by the people who raised Maxwell. His face lights up with a particular happiness when I mention how I’ve often seen his family (decked out in head-to-toe Brandon Maxwell, naturally) laughing as they touch up make-up in the bathroom before his shows. “My family goes everywhere with me, pretty much, or I go with them… they are the cornerstone of my life,” he says.

Meanwhile, after running a business with many of the same employees he launched with, Maxwell’s team has become its own sort of familial unit. He counts prolific production manager Marla Weinhoff as an indispensable resource for conceptualizing his shows, and makeup artist Fulvia Farolfi as his go-to for backstage beauty wizardry. He nods to his long-term publicist, who is sitting in on our talk, and mentions she supported him at his father’s funeral just six weeks prior, and calls out his assistant for seamlessly getting him from appointment to appointment on the daily. He pauses and looks pensive, and says he doesn’t want to leave anyone out. “I’ve pretty much worked with most of that team from the very early days, and I am so beyond blessed by that,” he says. “They always show up, but the ways that they were able to show up for me in the last year were so selfless, anybody would be lucky to experience 1% of that. I would say I owe everything to them, certainly.”

Having such a close knit group of collaborators has made Maxwell’s latest successes all the sweeter, and he sounds proud and hopeful as he reflects on the past several months. “It felt like ‘I'm so low, I have nowhere else to go at this point but up,’” he says. “That realization and the anger, frustration, and sadness that come in dark moments of our life reinvigorated something in me and in my job.” Now as he draws close to the ten-year anniversary of his namesake label, Maxwell never felt better prepared to begin a new chapter stronger, wiser, and more confident than he’s ever been before. “Where Brandon Maxwell can go, I think the possibilities are endless. And I think that I'm finally ready to go there and I'm ready to do it in my own way, regardless of what the rules are and what people think,” he says. “I’m ready to move on to a more joyful moment in my life and my brand.”