This April 25, 2018 photo shows fashion designer Brandon Maxwell at Neiman Marcus in downtown Dallas. Hard work has prepared Maxwell for fortuitous opportunities, like working with Lady Gaga, that have helped him become a maestro of runways and red carpets. In 2016, Maxwell won the fashion world’s Oscar for his nascent line of luxury women’s ready-to-wear. (Smiley N. Pool/The Dallas Morning News via AP)

DALLAS (AP) — Brandon Maxwell is an unlikely “it” guy of the high-fashion world.

The Dallas Morning News reports the 33-year-old grew up openly gay and as a bit of a misfit in Longview, where he felt threatened and insecure outside his loving cocoon of family and close friends.

Hard work prepared him for fortuitous opportunities — like working with Lady Gaga — that have helped him become a maestro of runways and red carpets.

“I didn’t have fashion pedigrees to bring to the table,” Maxwell says. “I knew the only thing I was going to be able to do was work like a crazy person.”

Fast-forward to 2016, when Maxwell won the fashion world’s Oscar for his nascent line of luxury women’s ready-to-wear. Supermodel Naomi Campbell was his plus-one.

“Imagine being a slightly overweight kid from East Texas, being nominated for womenswear designer of the year, and you have Naomi Campbell as your date,” he says in a recent interview. “You would almost fall over from a stroke. In that moment when I was up there looking at everyone, I thought, ‘If nothing else ever happens in my life, this happened to me.’ “

The Council of Fashion Designers has given the awards annually to some of the biggest names in fashion — think Vera Wang, Tom Ford, Michael Kors and Oscar de la Renta — at a black-tie gala in New York City.

Maxwell was so certain that he wouldn’t win the Swarovski Award for Womenswear that he had unbuttoned the neck of his sweat-soaked shirt, kicked off his tight dress shoes and hung his personally designed Giorgio Armani tuxedo jacket over the back of his chair.

He had to frantically reassemble himself when they called his name.

“Naomi Campbell is like, ‘Get up, dude. You’ve just won,’ ” he laughs.

His line of expensive women’s ready-to-wear is carried by more than 100 stores, including Neiman Marcus. His statement tops sell for $1,495 to $2,000, and he’s known for tailored jumpsuits, flowing bell-sleeved blouses and long, slinky gowns that seem slightly retro and edgy at the same time.

He’s sold hundreds of pairs of his most popular wardrobe mainstay — black cigarette pants that retail for $995.

“We’ve branched out in the past few seasons to denim and more shirting and daywear,” says Maxwell, who is about to start work on his fall 2019 collection.

While Maxwell doesn’t disclose revenue, he says sales from his red carpet and ready-to-wear products have grown at a steady clip of 40-plus each season. Industry estimates place sales at under $10 million.

Maxwell says he’s tried to contain growth to maintain quality.

Neiman Marcus signed on early with Maxwell and has watched his designs progress over the last three years.

“We have seen Brandon add more sportswear to his collection, as well as introduce vibrant color,” says Neiman’s buyer Hillary Senko. “Brandon frequently speaks of the strong women who inspire him, and it is clear through his designs that Brandon is passionate about dressing women to make them feel confident and empowered for every occasion.”

Maxwell talks daily to his BFF Lady Gaga.

They’ve been personally and professionally intertwined since he started helping her dress for performances seven years ago, when he was 25 and she was 23.

He has created one-of-a-kind designs that cost upward of $60,000 for a bevy of celebrities, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Schumer, Nicole Kidman, Viola Davis and Jane Fonda.

“And Oprah!” he interjects, after giving the list some thought. “Can’t forget Oprah! Oh my God!”

“He’s done things for some beautiful, beautiful women,” says his father and business partner Mike Maxwell. “But they’re not all size ones.”

Brandon Maxwell famously transformed the cutout, hipbone-baring, floor-sweeping heavy white gown he’d designed for Karlie Kloss for the 2016 Met Gala into a jacketless minidress after someone spilled red wine on it.

The two made a video of the process, with Kloss wondering whether it was a terrible idea or a stroke of genius.

Vogue voted for the latter.

“I always make an exact duplicate in case something happens to the original,” Maxwell says. “She has a nice, fully constructed one in her closet.”

As Maxwell sees it: “Where I come from, you better be nice to everybody. If not, your mom’s going to have a problem with it, and you’re probably going to be grounded. That’s how I’ve approached life and business.”

Beginning in middle school, Maxwell’s idea of a high time was to scour beauty-supply and thrift stores and transform his half-dozen bestie girlfriends into teenage fashion models for photos he took with disposable cameras.

Maxwell is the eldest of four with a sister and a much younger half brother and half sister. His mother, Pam, and his father divorced 10 years into their marriage when Brandon was 7 and his sister, Kady, was 3. Pam remarried to Gordon Woolley, and they had two children. It’s a tightly bound blended family.

Brandon’s grandmother was a buyer and manager at Riff’s, Longview’s now-gone version of Neiman Marcus that catered to East Texas’ oil-rich clientele, and where he spent his after-school hours.

“I didn’t grow up in L.A., New York, London or Paris,” Maxwell says during a recent visit to Neiman’s downtown flagship, where his clothes are featured on its exclusive designer second floor. “I grew up in Longview going to Payless ShoeSource for my buy-one-get-one deals, eating at McDonalds and getting my stuff at Walmart.”

Maxwell, who wears a modern version of Clark Kent glasses, is a man of convenient tastes — preferring to keep things simple.

His color of choice is black. “It hides everything.”

Most of the time when he’s at his Manhattan studio, he’s in Nike workouts and running shoes.

Humor is serious business for him. From an early age, he used it as his foil against prejudice for him being gay.

“If I could make people laugh, maybe they’d see me more for who I was more than what they perceived I was before they met me,” he says.

Maxwell’s mother always thought he’d make a great lawyer.

“He could argue his way out of anything, confuse me and make me question why I was getting onto him in the first place.”

Maxwell talked his way into Marymount Manhattan College, even though he didn’t have the grades, and moved to New York in 2003.

Woolley remembers being worried to have her first-born so far away.

“As a parent, the best gift you can give your child is to nurture their interest, love hard, pray hard and let them live out their dream.”

But Maxwell lacked a sense of purpose in the Big Apple. After two years, he moved back to Texas to attend St. Edward’s University in Austin.

“Going to that school, my whole life began,” he says. “All of a sudden, I was on the dean’s list.

“I was working at school 18 hours a day in an art program and photography. I got to work on my true love, which is photography and directing.”

After getting his photography degree in 2008, Maxwell and Jessy Price, a fellow photographer who’s now his fiancé, took their shared vocation to New York, moving into a brownstone “closet” where the mattress literally hit all four bedroom walls.

Maxwell was eating out of vending machines and was about to polish off the last of his $10,000 in savings when prominent New York stylist Deborah Afshani called and asked him to be her intern.

That led to working with Nicola Formichetti, Lady Gaga’s fashion director, in 2010.

At the time, Gaga was just beginning to promote “The Fame Monster,” which set her firmly on her path to success.

When Formichetti shifted professional gears in 2012, Maxwell took over the lead role as Gaga’s fashion director in a seamless handoff. Maxwell has been credited with leading her away from her bizarre costuming phase — à la the raw meat dress worn at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards — and into a sultry, sophisticated look suitable for duets with Tony Bennett.

“That’s a bit of media misconception that I’m the glamour guy,” Maxwell says. “I’ve been a part of all of it. I was Nicola’s assistant, so I had the meat dress made.”

When Maxwell’s mother learned about her son’s new gig, she didn’t know who the entertainer was.

“I was like, ‘Who is Lady Gaga?'” says Woolley, who still lives in Longview. “I listened to country-Western or my ’70s music.”

She’s a fan now.

Over lunch with a fashion reporter in spring 2015, Maxwell talked about starting a line of Brandon Maxwell clothes. The next thing he knew, he was reading online that he was launching a collection that fall.

“Talking about it and seeing it on the internet are two different things,” he says. “So I had to come up with (a collection) pretty fast. And hire people. And get money. The fantasy of whipping up dresses very quickly turned into the reality of running a business.”

He turned to his father for help.

Mike Maxwell’s question was why?

“He was a stylist for Gaga and he was doing really, really well,” Mike recalls. “His answer was ‘I love this.’ And I said, ‘OK, let ‘er rip.’ “

The company, Brandon Vance (his middle name) LLC, is owned 50-50 by Brandon and Mike, former chief operating officer of Glazer’s Distributors, the multibillion-dollar wine, beer and spirits company. Mike, 61, retired at 52 to become an Anglican priest at a church at Lake Cherokee outside Longview.

“I went from one spirit to the other,” Mike says, showing where his son might have gotten his wit.

“It takes a very particular parent when your kid says, ‘I’m going to start a fashion business,’ to get behind that,” says Brandon. “He knew I was young and naive, and he wanted to watch out for me. I’m really grateful for that.

“I had to take a lot of risks. And that’s very scary as a parent. He did a good job of being very patient with me. Obviously, he raised me, so he knew what he was in for.”

Brandon Maxwell is considering a secondary line of products that are more affordable for younger women, as well as shoes, bags, beauty products and even home furnishings.

His 15 full-time and eight part-time employees are all women — most of them under 25.

Why an all-woman crew?

“I do not want to start making clothes that make women look like Barbie dolls,” he says. “When I’m in fittings, these young women will tell me whether they’d wear it. The product is improved so much because they’re my sounding board.

“If you’re going to be a brand for women, you better damn well employ women.”

His first collection didn’t have a pocket in anything. His fashion photographer took issue and he listened.

Maxwell and his team stayed up all night adding pockets into every garment.

Now he wouldn’t consider designing anything without one — except those skin-tight black pants. He tried, but it didn’t work.

Maxwell wants to use his elevated status to help young people who might be going through painful experiences similar to the ones he faced growing up.

“I was scared to go out as a kid, afraid that somebody might beat me up,” he says, admitting that he doesn’t really know today if those fears were real or of his mental making. “I just knew I was going to get out of town and do something with my life. I knew I was going to create something big for myself.

“When you’re different and you’re young, so many kids give up before they ever get started because they don’t understand when they’re 17 that you grow up to be 25, then 30, and it gets better,” he says. “Your life changes. And you can make something of yourself. A lot of young people can’t see past that.”

Maxwell hastens to add that he loves his hometown and gets back to Longview about once every three months. The women there, including many of his mom’s friends, are among his most loyal customers.

“The smoke-and-mirrors show of how famous and what a fabulous designer you are and the wonderful lifestyle you lead is a dangerous road to be on. You lose touch with the people you originally started doing this job for.

“My purpose, I hope, is going to be much bigger than clothes.”