“I am very interested in building a business and I wanted to really spend a lot of time getting right on that — who I am, what type of clothes that I make. I sort of look at this as 2.0 in a way, it’s refocusing on — as I’ve been doing it for a few seasons — what I think the brand does well and what the brand is about, and what my original intention was,” Brandon Maxwell said ahead of his most intimate runway show to date.

Over the last two seasons the designer has shown via appointment, or not at all, to reprioritize “what’s really important,” he said. That is, returning to the origins of his business with serviceable, consistent designs with a strong focus on detail and hand feel. His spring show, set within a small fourth floor room of the Brant Foundation with a skylight displaying rippling water overhead and live music by a small group from the New York Philharmonic, displayed this quiet strength.

His look of effortless, easy American sportswear with a bit of sexiness and edge came through via clear, concise repetition in fabrication and silhouette. It started with Maxwell’s bestselling Irving pant, cut in silk nylon, grain de poudre, crepe, Sea Island cotton, leather and crinkled silk.

“Sometimes I feel that I’ve looked back at the collections and it’s been 36 different things. So I’m going to do 30, direct to the point, and repeat and show the customer how she can wear the pieces,” he said of the collection’s staples of crinkled button-ups, jeans, rolled Sea Island cotton layered T-shirts and cashmere sweaters. Both jeans, here with integrated sleeves tied around the waist, and knits, accented with grommets, were noted to be bestselling categories.

His very first collection’s cigarette pants with cummerbund and men’s suiting jacket were evolved into compact knit bodysuits, trousers with pre-styled, pulled-down waistbands exposing little removable cummerbunds, and blazers spliced at the sides for lofty cashmere knits and scarfs to slide through. And fall 2017’s exaggerated, pleated sleeves were moved down, protruding off the hips of a black and white dress and cool pair of red pants.

The return to form didn’t stop there, as seen in a great leather jacket with box pleated backs, men’s smoking scarfs that draped down the side of easy T-shirts and shapely dresses in grain de poudre, with curved necklines; in supple leather with sensual cuts, or in new silk raffia.

“There’s a casualness to the customer but she likes to get dressed when she wants to, and we want to meet her in both places,” he aptly said of spring.