At four he told his parents he was a dressmaker. At ten he showed a collection in Paris
“You can make a dress out of pickles. Out of spoons. Out of hangers.” Max Alexander is the world’s youngest runway designer, per Guinness World Records.
At four years old, Max Alexander told his parents he was a dressmaker. By age 10, he was showing a collection at Paris Fashion Week.
He is the world’s youngest fashion runway designer, according to Guinness World Records. He created garments for Denver Fashion Week in 2023 at age seven and showed a 15-look women’s collection at the Palais Garnier in Paris in March. This weekend he attends the debut of a documentary about his life at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
He cannot pinpoint what led him to design so young. He says he enjoys it because he can express his creativity in many ways. “You could use any fabric, any material,” he said in an interview at the studio in his Los Angeles home. “You can make a dress out of pickles. You can make a dress out of spoons. You can make a dress out of hangers. It’s, like, crazy.”
He draws inspiration from his surroundings and always looks for sustainable materials. “Like coffee bean bags. My mom is a coffee lover, so I was like, why not make a dress out of coffee bean sacks? After 10 years, you can put them in the ground and they biodegrade. It helps our planet too.”
He describes his Paris show, and walking the runway to applause, simply: “Very fun. It wasn’t scary for me. I was like, oh, all these people appreciate me and I should be happy.”
His designs — dresses, pyjamas, tees, hoodies and more — are sold on a namesake website, with collections for men, women and children. At the time of the interview he was designing an outfit to wear to the Broadway musical Hamilton. He explains his process as “the dress cycle”: “Think. Drape. Sew,” followed by “Done! Voila!”
Between choosing fabrics, draping mannequins and figuring out how to work with models, he has the normal concerns of someone who has just finished fourth grade. Chiefly, that both recess and lunch will be shorter in fifth. “It sounds harder,” he said. “I think it’s worse because we only have 10-minute recesses but we used to have 25, which is kind of sad.”