Brandon Maxwell

For Fall 2020, Maxwell staged his most institutionally ambitious pre-pandemic runway in the Hall of North American Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History. Tailoring, sportswear and evening pieces were shown against the museum’s historic dioramas, while authorised Jean-Michel Basquiat references entered textiles, knits and accessories and the cast of Cheer disrupted the usual restraint of a luxury runway audience.

The collection brought several strands of the late-2010s house together at once: Americana, pop-cultural accessibility, civic-scale staging and increasingly broad wardrobe design. It became the natural endpoint of the label’s theatrical expansion before the pandemic forced a much more intimate approach to showing clothes.