20Something: Max

“I’m trying to ball, I’m trying to have fun, I’m trying to make great art.”

- Maxwell Bresler

It made sense for me to begin this series with Max. For starters, I’ve known him longer than anyone (since birth). I think I know him better than most people do (though he may beg to differ). And yet, our brains could not operate more differently.

Max’s creativity seems to know no bounds - he’s one of those people who somehow excels at several forms of visual art, the latest and most definite being fashion design. He’s not big on making plans, and much to the dismay of my type-A brain, is far more content to go with the flow and see where life takes him. He has plenty of dreams and ambitions, and plenty of roads he could take to get there. His favorite color is “all of them,” and his go-to karaoke song is Lady Gaga’s “Alejandro.”

We catch up over the phone, which has become our primary mode of contact while he works around the clock to put together his upcoming fashion show. He dials in from his Pilsen studio (which doubles as a bedroom on nights when he can’t bring himself to stop working on a garment), and I can hear the glaze fall over his eyes. He’s just finished several hours of model fittings.

Many of our conversations over the past month or so have revolved around his show, so I want to steer this one in a different direction. The purpose of this series is to find the common threads of life in our 20s, no matter the variances in our day to day lives. I can’t exactly relate to putting together a fashion show, so I bring up the phrase that so often brings a look of “ugh, relatable,” to the eyes of the beholder: “post-grad.”

I’m curious if he identifies with the post-grad archetype, since he dropped out of college in 2020 after his sophomore year. Surprisingly, he tells me he still thinks of these past two years as being educational, so he hasn’t fully entered the post-grad period that would follow a traditional academic career. He says that while he hasn’t been putting many of his pieces up for sale, he saw the months following his departure from school as a period of continued learning, both from himself and from the world around him. That would make his upcoming show a senior thesis of sorts.

“The past two years was my slow transition into doing strictly womenswear and primarily sewing couture,” he explains. “When I first started making clothes, I knew that my end goal was to sew couture and do shows… I knew that was what I wanted to do, but I didn’t have the skills or taste level to be able to fully curate that to the extent that I can now.” He tells me that he’s spent the past two years teaching himself how to make womenswear and honing his “taste.” 

Knowing his general aversion to being told how to do something, I wonder what resources he’s turned to for this self-education. Turns out, it’s just a lot of trial and error, in addition to astutely observing the sartorial world around him. A pocket here, a hemline there, the silhouette of a hood - when he sees something that piques his interest, it often finds its way onto his cutting table, but in his own iteration. Evidently, the Blue line in winter is a great place to collect design inspiration. 

He gets bored when he uses the same techniques too repetitively, which forces him to think outside the box. “My artistic skill does not lie in my ability to make clothes, it lies in my ability to improvise.” (Which, by the way, he attributes to the endless hours he spent during our childhood building Legos.) In fact, he intentionally strays from the traditional process of making a garment (make a pattern, cut a muslin sample, refine it, readjust the pattern, then cut the final version), and jumps straight to the last step. He makes one pattern, cuts his final fabric, and rolls with the punches. Or in this case, the trimmings.

“There are so many mistakes that I could make. A lot of times I’ll start making a garment and it will just go the exact opposite direction of what I originally planned.” 

That stresses me out.

 I ask him if he does this because it’s the more economical option (he’s still operating as a one-man show), or if it’s because he likes the unknown that comes with being forced to adapt to your mistakes. “The majority of my creative process comes from the actual activity of making [a garment],” he explains. “If I’m building it and it’s looking off, that’s where the improvisation comes in.” Whatever choices he makes in the moment have to be included in the final garment. Whatever happens happens, and he has to accept it.

Eliminating the sampling process, while high-stakes, allows him to make far more pieces in a shorter amount of time. Knowing how quickly his brain churns out ideas, this feels completely necessary to his survival as an artist.  

I pose this thought to him: “It’s almost like time is part of your artistic medium. Some people use clay, or chalk, or whatever. I would argue that you use time.” He goes silent for a beat, and then tells me he’s never thought of that before. But when he reflects on his design process, he realizes that time is, in fact, a huge factor in what he decides to make each day.

Lately, he’s been creating silhouettes that are inspired by traditional Victorian styles. He wants to pay homage to what couture used to be, but with a distorted, rugged construction. “I don’t have the resources to sew full haute couture, you know,” he says, “people will have an entire team helping them sew one garment. I don’t have that.” Instead, he adapts, opting for efficiency when he can. Sometimes he’ll skip a finished hem or a lining, but each corner he cuts lends itself to a more robust final product. To the untrained (and admittedly, sometimes the trained) eye, certain elements may look like they’ve been wrongly constructed, but “at this point, it’s a calculated approach.”

“If you had the resources to produce these things on a larger scale, would you still make those choices to leave certain pieces slightly unconstructed?” I ask. 

He would, he thinks. He says it gives his garments soul. It’s what makes them come alive. “The method of construction, although it’s so wrong, it’s so genuine.” It’s why he only makes one of each design.

Apparently, “soulless garments'' are a symptom of an increasingly saturated fashion industry. Much of fashion has become sensationalized with over-the-top pieces that don’t really make you think, because they’re putting everything they have to give right in front of you. There’s not much beyond the initial visual reaction - the kneejerk, ‘Oh, that piece is cool!’ that many of the creations making their way down the runway elicit. But, he ponders, “is ‘cool’ enough?” 

For him, it’s not. Once a creator of these kneejerk-reaction-eliciting pieces, he wants his new designs to carry an air of sophistication and depth. He wants to present his viewers with the challenge of understanding his work beyond its visual form. “Stuff needs stories, stuff needs soul, stuff needs life, you know, for something to really….” He trails off for a moment before dropping the wisdom bomb of the century: “These are my Horcruxes.” I let out a hoot of laughter. 

He’s completely right.

“I don’t know, I think about the concept of immortality through art sometimes. How do you immortalize yourself via your art? You know, I think it’s like a Horcrux, like taking a part of your soul and putting it into something that will let you live forever.” At the end of this all, he says he’ll have a lifetime of work to look back on, each garment containing a fraction of his soul. 

I want to know what his dream life would look like, if he could have it right at this moment. “My biggest goal, eventually, is to be doing two shows a year in New York and selling garments on top of that. Like selling garments as a brand.”

“Do you think you’ll achieve it?”

“Hell yeah.”

You can attend the upcoming Maxwell Bresler show on October 28th, 2022.