At four he told his parents he was a tailor. At ten he showed a collection in Paris

At the age of four Max Alexander told his parents he was a tailor. By ten he had shown a collection at Paris Fashion Week.

Guinness World Records has him as the youngest runway designer in the world. In 2023, aged seven, he made pieces for Denver Fashion Week, and in March he showed a fifteen-look women’s collection at the Grand Opera in Paris. This weekend he travels to the premiere of a documentary about him at the Tribeca festival in New York.

He cannot explain what exactly brought him to design so early. He says he simply likes that creativity can be expressed in different ways. “You can use any fabric, any material,” he said in an interview at his studio, set up at home in Los Angeles. “You can make a dress out of cucumbers. You can make a dress out of spoons. You can make a dress out of coat hangers. It’s kind of crazy.”

He takes inspiration from what is around him and always looks for sustainable materials. “Coffee bean sacks, for instance. My mum loves coffee, and I thought, why not make a dress out of coffee sacks? In ten years you can bury them in the ground and they will decompose. That helps our planet too.”

He describes his Paris show, and walking the runway to applause, simply: “Really fun. I wasn’t scared. I thought, oh, all these people appreciate me, and I should be happy.”

His pieces — dresses, pyjamas, T-shirts, hoodies and more — are sold on his eponymous website; there are collections for men, women and children. At the time of the interview he was designing the outfit he would wear to the Broadway musical Hamilton. He describes his process as “the dress cycle”: “Think it up. Drape it. Sew it.” And then: “Done! Voilà!”

Between choosing fabrics, draping mannequins and working with models, he still has the ordinary concerns of someone who has just finished fourth grade. Chief among them is that in fifth grade both break and lunch get shorter. “It sounds harder,” he says. “I think it’s worse, because we’ll only get ten minutes of break, and it used to be twenty-five. It’s a bit sad.”