HELMUT LANG

Helmut Lang was entirely self-taught — a made-to-measure studio in Vienna in 1977, a boutique in 1979, then the label proper in 1986, launched off the back of a Centre Pompidou exhibition on Viennese modernism in which he was the only fashion designer included. Through the nineties his stark, deconstructed cutting was the counter-argument to eighties opulence, and the denim became a category of its own. In 1998 he moved the house to New York and scheduled his show a week ahead of the European collections, dragging the rest of the calendar with it; the same year he became the first designer to livestream a runway show.