"I think I always had a good sense of seeing things that were coming and was never afraid to explore them" HELMUT LANG
Helmut Lang is simultaneously one of the most influential and one of the most copied designers of the last decade. Starting his label in Vienna in 1977,without any formal training, the Austrian designer(born in 1956) showed his first fully formed ready-to-wear collection in Paris in 1986. He was already displaying the shape of things to come:his austere,utilitarian and sportwear-inspired design would go on to dominate the 1990s. Lang formulated the prevailing,stripped-down silhouette of that decade and applied it to both sexes- he was one of the first to show mens"s and womenswear together. He experimented and introduced techno fabrics to a catwalk style,playing with technology further by showing one collection solely on the Internet,the first designer to do so. While Giorgio Armani is sometimes credited as the father of it and Jil Sander was another early pursuer, it is Lang who fully articulated what has become known as minimalism - a term that he personally doesn"t like. Maybe that dislike stems from Lang"s almost autobiographical approach to his design: the combination of the formal and the casual at the heart of his aesthetic comes from the strict business suits he was made to wear as a teenager by his stepmother. Rather than trends, there is the sense of experimentation within a single identity in his collections. In 1998, Helmut Lang relocated his fashion house to New York . A year later he sold 51 % of his company to the Prada group. This has proved the start of a new phase for the designer, with a move into a more luxe aesthetic, together with the launch of a perfume and accesories range.
" Always be open-minded, curios ,forward-thinking and the suspicious"