Helmut Lang - Fashion Designer | Designers | The FMD Helmut Lang A word from the EIC Partnerships / Cooperations Become a fashion editor on FMD Content / Usage Questions Why am I listed on FMD? How can I submit content? Credifair (credit for your work) DMCA + Content MGMT the pure fashion news agency January 18th Ralph Lauren and Karl Lagerfeld to dress Melania Trump? ASAP Rocky and Boy George Star in Dior Homme's New Campaign Irina Shayk Lands Two Vogue Brazil Covers Weekly News roundup: Jan 9 - Jan 13 About the designers Helmut Lang is an Austrian fashion designer born in March 10, 1956 in Vienna known for his minimalist, deconstructive, and often severe designs. His parents divorced when he was 3 years old and he lived with his grandfather, a shoemaker, in the mountains behind Salzburg. When he was 21, he had a fruitless search for perfectly made T-shirts and jackets. So he decided to design and make his own. Originally, Lang studied business, but switched over to fashion and opened his first studio in 1977.

He specialized in avant-garde clothing which disregarded convention. A 'deconstructionist', Lang works in an essentially urban style. He blends cheap and expensive fabrics and blurs the lines between traditional menï¿½s wear and womenï¿½s wear. His clothes were fairly successful in his native Austria, and he branched out to Paris in 1986. At the time in the late 1980ï¿½s and early 1990ï¿½s, minimalist fashion was at its height, with Jil Sander, Giorgio Armani, and Helmut Lang himself being very popular and successful. In 1998, he moved to New York. His 1998 collection was shown over the internet instead of physically. the label In 1999 Lang entered into collaboration with Prada to open boutiques all over Europe and expand his line. He is now poised to become a major global marketing force, with a Jeans line, a perfume deal with Proctor and Gamble and a leather license in the pipeline.

Prada had acquired 51% of Helmut Lang's company in August 1999, and in September 2004, they took complete control by buying out the remaining 49%. It was announced that Helmut will continue as creative director of the company designing the clothes. Financial details were not disclosed. In a surprise announcement in January 2005, the Prada Group who own Helmet Lang's company, informed of his departure from his own company. He has been considered a by-word for cool in recent years, and it appears his ideas for running his company were at odds with the Prada management just as Jil Sander's were when she left her own company recently. In March Prada announced that they would close the Helmut Lang showroom in New York. However Helmut is not yet down. He is talking to several major companies about the future. After Mr. Lang's departure, Prada unsuccessfully tried to continue the collections with an in-house design team. In March 2005, Prada closed down the label's headquarters in SoHo, New York. In September 2005, Prada announced that production of the lines had been halted.

By the end of 2005, all that existed of the brand was its name: the design atelier had been closed, the collections had been discontinued and all of the art-inspired Helmut Lang stores had been shut down (with the exception of the Paris location, to sell remaining stock). The corporate web site, which formerly displayed pictures of the collections, remained online, but the contents could no longer be seen. On March 17, 2006, Prada Group announced that, after six loss-making years, Link Theory Holdings (LTH) of Tokyo would be acquiring the Helmut Lang brand for an estimated ï¿½20 million. This came about three weeks after Prada had sold the Jil Sander label to British equity firm Change Capital Partners (CCP). Already in spring 2005, it had been rumored that Prada was trying to sell the label. Prada Group was said to want to concentrate on its core labels, Prada and Miu Miu, again.

The Japanese holding company LTH, developer of the theory fashion label in Japan and the US, re-launched the Helmut Lang collections under the direction of a "suitable" designer for the spring/summer 2007 season (presented in fall 2006), in select boutiques worldwide as a ï¿½contemporary brand".The new label was said to be based out of New York City. LTH also owns profitable German fashion house Rosner, which it bought in late October 2005, as well as the Joie, PLS+T and Kulson labels. Rumor had it for a while that Russian-born designer Alexandre Plokhov of menswear label Cloak, a former men's pattern maker for fashion house Marc Jacobs, and winner of the 2005 Swarovski's Perry Ellis Award for Emerging Talent Menswear, might be the new designer for Helmut Lang. It was never, though, expected that Lang himself would return to the label that bears his name, although Chikara Sasake, president and chief executive of LTH, gave to understand that if Lang ï¿½wants to come back, the door is always openï¿½.

In May 2006, it was announced that Michael and Nicole Colovos, an American-New Zealand designer couple, who formerly had their own Los Angeles-based denim label Habitual, had been installed by Link Theory as creative directors for the new Helmut Lang brand. From February 2007, select upscale retailers such as Barneys or Bergdorf Goodman carry the spring/summer 2007 Helmut Lang contemporary sportswear collection. The design office has been set up in West Chelsea in New York. The collection, described as "a commercial reduction of [Mr. Lang's] fashion identity",has received quite favorable reviews even though it is clearly not seen as a continuation of the original line. The item prices in the collection are about 20% above those for comparable Link Theory items and, hence, below the original Helmut Lang prices. Link Theory expects to generate US$ 8 million in revenues in 2008, and make a profit in 2009 with the label.The company also announced that "over the long term" they intend "to also establish exclusive Helmut Lang shops" in the US, Europe and Japan.

The Helmut Lang web site was re-activated at the end of 2006 and was fully launched in spring 2007. Lang, who now resides on Long Island of independent means, is said not to be involved in the re-launch in any way All of the original, art-inspired signature Helmut Lang stores that existed in Vienna, Munich, Milan, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Tokyo, as well as several stores-in-store in the Asian market, that existed between 1995 and 2005 have been closed. The last one to close was the Paris location in 2005 to sell remaining stock. In March 2007, Link Theory opened the first post-Prada signature Helmut Lang store in Tokyo's fashionable Aoyama district. In Japan, the company has since then installed several Helmut Lang stores-in-store at local department stores. In August 2007, a new freestanding Helmut Lang store was opened on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. It is, after the Tokyo store, the second signature Helmut Lang store since the closing of the last original store in Paris.

The store, in close proximity to Melrose Place, is adjacent to an existing theory store at 8424 Melrose Avenue. Another Helmut Lang store opened on September 28, 2007 on Maiden Lane in San Francisco, in the building previously occupied by Jil Sander. In New York City, a temporary 'pop-up shop' opened in mid-December 2007, while the company is apparently looking for a larger location in the Meatpacking District. The Look The name Helmut Lang has become synonymous with the cerebral brand of minimalism that took the fashion world by storm in the late eighties. Lang's razor-sharp lines and high-tech fabrics are made for only the most disciplined of bodies - even his signature t-shirts, which elevated the clingy tee to couture status, are famously unforgiving (and famously expensive). He has a stark sober palette, often slashed with bright colour, which reflects a modern, even futuristic perspective. His cleverly thought out clothes are cleanly and precisely tailored, but in an exploratory, quirky manner. His fabric combinations reveal a forward-looking approach.

Perfumes Helmut Lang Outlet Stores in New York, United States | Outletaholic Saks Fifth Avenue OFF 5TH About Helmut Lang Brand Fashion Designer, Helmut Lang, was born on 10 March 1956 in Vienna, Austria. When he was three years old, his parents divorced; he then lived with his grandfather, who worked as a shoemaker in a village near Salzburg. Lang first took commercial courses at a local trade academy before he switched over to fashion design. Lang opened his first studio in 1977, when he was twenty-one years old, and designed T-shirts and jackets. He soon started to specialize in avant-garde fashion; by the mid-1980s, his women's ready-to-wear collections had become well known in his home country. He launched his first catwalk show in Paris in 1986, nine years after the opening of his first atelier. His minimalist approach was labeled as deconstructionist and avant-garde. In 1987 he also began to design men's wear, and promoted an essentially pure urban style.

After Lang's success in Paris, he divided his time between his design studio in Vienna and his consulting agency in Paris. Lang was appointed professor of fashion design at Vienna's Universität für Angewandte Kunst, a college-level institution for the applied arts, in 1993. Lang's core brand was the Helmut Lang Men's and Women's Collections. The brand was extended in 1995 with the addition of Helmut Lang underwear and shoes, followed by Helmut Lang jeans in the following year, as well as Helmut Lang protective eyewear and accessories. The designer achieved a high level of recognition through these extensions of his brand. He moved to New York in 1998 in order to get an international reputation in the fashion world and entered into a collaborative relationship with the Italian luxury brand Prada in 2000. Lang also launched his first perfumes in 2000. © 2017 Outletaholic Helmut Lang | Austrian fashion designer and artist | Britannica.com Austrian fashion designer and artist Written By: Originally published in the Britannica Book of the Year. Presented as archival content.

Helmut Lang Austrian fashion designer and artist born Vienna , Austria Helmut Lang, (born March 10, 1956, Vienna , Austria ), On May 4, 2012, in an exhibition space in a town house in New York City’s Greenwich Village , Austrian fashion-designer-turned-artist Helmut Lang opened a solo art show, his first major show in New York City. The more than 20 sculptures—made mostly from rubber discs, foam, plastic, and tar stacked into totemlike structures—were a striking evocation of metamorphosis . For his 2011 exhibit at the Fireplace Project on Long Island , Lang drew inspiration from the fire that had occurred in his fashion studio the previous year. Make It Hard consisted of treelike structures that were created from pieces taken from his own clothing archive; some 6,000 items were shredded and reconstructed with resin and glue. Lang spent his early childhood with his grandparents in a small mountain village in the Austrian Alps. He lived with his father and stepmother from ages 10 to 18, when he left home.

His career as a fashion designer was born after friends admired a T-shirt and pants that Lang had designed (a seamstress had executed his work) and asked him to design for them. By 1979 Lang, who lacked formal training, had opened a small shop in Vienna. He was invited to show his work in Paris in 1986, and his minimalist designs wrought in synthetic fabrics garnered immediate attention. One of his most-talked-about creations was a sleeveless rubber dress that required the wearer to liberally apply talcum powder on herself prior to trying it on. Other items included silk blouses that resembled transparent plastic trash bags, colour-changing shirts (activated upon skin contact), and coats that sported huge collars. Lang, who was considered one of the most important designers of the 1990s, relocated to New York City in 1997, and the following year he changed the schedule of international shows by presenting his spring collection in New York before the European shows had taken place. The Council of Fashion Designers of America named him Menswear Designer of the Year in 2000.

In 2005, however, at the peak of his career, he sold his label to Prada and retired from fashion. Lang had long had a connection with the art world, counting among his friends the artists Jenny Holzer and Louise Bourgeois . In 1996 he and Holzer created a piece, I Smell You on My Clothes, for the Florence Biennale, and his print ad campaigns were more art than advertising, featuring images of Bourgeois as well as photographs taken by Robert Mapplethorpe . Lang’s first formal entry into the art world was a single piece—Next Ever After, a three-dimensional multifaceted mirrored object—that was on display in a gallery in Brooklyn for several weeks beginning in December 2007. That was followed in 2008 by a major exhibition of 22 pieces, including sculptures and installations, at the Kestnergesellschaft, an exhibition space in Hannover , Ger. Like his other work, those pieces were deconstructed materials that were assembled in a unique way.

Among the most noteworthy of Lang’s works were lifeforms, shallow oak boxes that were filled with sheepskin and tar to create a resonant and complex surface, and surrogate skins, a tactile series made of layers of translucent paper and glue. Helmut Lang Fashion Designer | Helmut Lang Biography, Information, Videos, News and the Latest Runway Collections. Fashion Biography Helmut Lang, Fashion Designer Fashion Designer Helmut Lang was born in 1956 in Vienna, Austria. Before turning to fashion design, Lang went to a local trade academy and was trained to become a businessman. His career switch to fashion was accompanied by the opening of his first own studio in 1977. In the mid eighties he became a celebrated designer with his first ready to wear collections in his hometown Vienna. Soon after the first success in Austria, he started to show women"s clothes in Paris, France in 1986. In 1987 followed a men"s collection. Lang switches back and forth between Vienna and Paris, designing in his atelier in Vienna and consulting with his agent in Paris. Today, Lang is considered one of the pace makers of fashion design.

Lang has been labeled a deconstructionist, a futurist, and a minimalist, always attributed with fashion trends that soon after will be adopted by the fashion bcommunity. His creations have inspired a whole generation of new designers, like the new talents from Beligum, namely Dries van Noten or Dirk Bikkembergs. He uses uncommon materials and cuttings for clothes that are not loud in appearence, but unavoidable disturbing in nature. His designs are casual, but not sloppy and yet, they bear a certain harshness. Unlike his Italian colleagues, Lang undresses women with his clothes not with a voluptuous gesture, he does so with clinical coolness. Lang intends to avoid a subdivision of his designs into different brands. He wants to concentrate on strengthening the brand name Helmut Lang. The introduction of his underwear collection in 1995 and the jeans line in 1996 is seen as a move to broaden his customer base with more readily available and less exclusive products. Although his designs, as well as his fashion shows gain much attention publically, the person Helmut Lang avoids to become a public figure. That"s why there are hardly any photographs of the designer published (see our picture).

Selected Lines Helmut Lang Men"s and Women"s Clothes Helmut Lang Underwear, since 1995 Helmut Lang Jeans, since 1996 Helmut Lang Protective Eyewear, since 1996 Helmut Lang Shoes, since 1995 Helmut Lang Accessoires, since 1996 Selected Awards and Recognitions In 1993, Lang was appointed professor for fashion design at the Vienna College for the Applied Arts. Performance Economic figures of the Helmut Lang business are not reported, only the designer"s own assessment that sales are constantly rising and that the economic standing is excellent at the moment. Distribution Helmut Lang pursues a very restrictive distribution policy for his ready to wear collection. There are only three exclusive Helmut Lang boutiques right now: in Vienna, Austria (operated together with a division of the Austrian lingerie giant Palmers), in Munich,Germany, and in Milan, Italy. Lang plans to open stores in Paris, New York, Tokio, and Hong Kong in 1997. For his Jeans line, which will be introduced in 1997, 600 to 700 points of sale are planned worldwide.

Production/ Licenses Since 1988, Lang has several license arragements for the production and distribution of underwear, shoes, and eyewear. The new jeans line will be handled by the Italian partner Fashion Network a division of the GTR Group. In the U.S.A. the partner for distribution will be Onward Kashiyama USA Inc. Outlook For the future a perfume license is envisioned, as well as a luxury line, offering the best available materials and craftmanship in production. Related Topics Best Fall Fashion Trends For 2012 For Fall 2012 designers are inspired by a wide range of influences, from the elaborate details of brocade and metallic gold embellishments to the dynamic mix of military chic and power pantsuits. Colo By Courtney Lynne I am an analyst by profession and researching is my passion. I also love to share my knowledge. Contact me on Google + and Twitter . Find us on Google+ Advertisement Helmut Lang Outlet Stores in Florida, United States | Outletaholic Saks Fifth Avenue OFF 5TH About Helmut Lang Brand Fashion Designer, Helmut Lang, was born on 10 March 1956 in Vienna, Austria.

When he was three years old, his parents divorced; he then lived with his grandfather, who worked as a shoemaker in a village near Salzburg. Lang first took commercial courses at a local trade academy before he switched over to fashion design. Lang opened his first studio in 1977, when he was twenty-one years old, and designed T-shirts and jackets. He soon started to specialize in avant-garde fashion; by the mid-1980s, his women's ready-to-wear collections had become well known in his home country. He launched his first catwalk show in Paris in 1986, nine years after the opening of his first atelier. His minimalist approach was labeled as deconstructionist and avant-garde. In 1987 he also began to design men's wear, and promoted an essentially pure urban style. After Lang's success in Paris, he divided his time between his design studio in Vienna and his consulting agency in Paris. Lang was appointed professor of fashion design at Vienna's Universität für Angewandte Kunst, a college-level institution for the applied arts, in 1993. Lang's core brand was the Helmut Lang Men's and Women's Collections.

The brand was extended in 1995 with the addition of Helmut Lang underwear and shoes, followed by Helmut Lang jeans in the following year, as well as Helmut Lang protective eyewear and accessories. The designer achieved a high level of recognition through these extensions of his brand. He moved to New York in 1998 in order to get an international reputation in the fashion world and entered into a collaborative relationship with the Italian luxury brand Prada in 2000. Lang also launched his first perfumes in 2000. © 2017 Outletaholic Helmut Lang - Bio, Facts, Family | Famous Birthdays Helmut Lang Pisces Artist#28 About New York-based artist whose best-known works included "Long Island Diaries" and "The Selective Memory Series." He was known for his use of nontraditional artistic materials like rubber, feathers, and metallic fabrics. Before Fame He was a self-taught fashion designer who, in his early twenties, opened his own clothing shop in Vienna, Austria. His first runway collection was shown two years later at Paris' Centre Georges Pompidou.

Trivia He was the 2009 recipient of the prestigious Österreichischen Ehrenzeichens für Wissenschaft und Kuns Award. Family Life His parents divorced when he was an infant, and he was raised for a decade by his maternal grandparents. At the age of 10, he moved to the home of his father and stepmother. Helmut Lang's Legacy, Ten Years After the Designer Quit Fashion for Art - The Atlantic The Atlantic See our Newsletters > The Inimitable Helmut Lang The designer hasn’t made clothes in more than a decade, but his influence on modern fashion is stronger than ever. Richard Drew / AP Print Text Size Regardless of whether you follow fashion or not, you know this look—a stark, industrial, sharp-cut, androgynous, predominantly black-and-white mashup of high-fashion and low. And you know it because it’s everywhere. If You Think Amazon is Huge now, Wait Until it Becomes America’s Biggest Fashion Retailer What you may not know is that it reflects the enduring influence of one designer: Helmut Lang. This year marks a decade since Lang left the label that still bears his name, and it’s remarkable just how influential the self-taught, Austrian-born designer still is.

His hallmarks seem so basic, and are so widespread both on the runway and off, that it’s hard to believe they ever had to be popularized. Though Lang has long since moved on to life as an artist, the clothes he created for his brand remain desirable and relevant enough that they still turn up in editorial shoots, and as an object of obsession among collectors. In essence what Lang did was create a new design language. He’s regarded as one of the premier minimalists because of the raw, stripped-down, architectural quality of his clothes, and these signatures—along with his color palette of black, white, and earthy neutrals—are easy to spot influencing everyone from Alexander Wang to emerging young designers such as Yang Li and Lee Roach. “The flat-front pant. The men’s three-button suit. The low-rise jean,” says Joanne Arbuckle, dean of the School of Art and Design at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, enumerating just a few of the current closet staples that Lang pioneered throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

“What he did continues to influence fashion.” * * * Just as importantly, he was one of the first high-fashion designers to bring the street onto the runway, reimagining everything from police uniforms to everyday clothing as high fashion. In his hands, the category of simple ready-to-wear was elevated into something avant-garde. He created the category of designer denim, making jeans a high-fashion item with a matching price tag— nearly $200 back in the ’90s. Lang splattered some of those pricey jeans with paint—rubber-based, so it wouldn’t come off in the wash—mimicking painters’ workwear. Today, the idea is standard fare. On others he incorporated the seamed, ergonomic knees of motorcycle pants. Now the biker jeans made by the luxury brand Balmain are one of the brand’s most popular and iconic items, worn regularly by celebrities such as Kanye West and Kim Kardashian and knocked off routinely by smaller labels. Their DNA can be traced straight back to Lang. Helmut Lang biker jeans from 1999, left, and Balmain’s current version, right. (Zachary Wasser / Mr.

Porter) He created garments based on bulletproof vests , and fabricated military bomber jackets in high-end or unusual fabrics, transforming them into luxury items. Expensive bombers are now prevalent in the collections of numerous designers, such as Rick Owens, who’s made them in silk and wool. Kanye West openly riffed on Lang’s clothes in his line for Adidas, while streetwear brands repeat these ideas as well, some going so far as to mimic the bondage straps Lang used. A photo posted by David Casavant (@davidcasavant) on Jun 12, 2015 at 1:49pm PDT Actually, the use of straps and harnesses, inspired by sources such as parachutes and bondage gear, is one of Lang’s most recognizable innovations . He put straps into the interiors of his jackets, for instance, so they could be worn like backpacks. The same element reappears in the work of New York-based designer Siki Im , who idolized Lang and joined the brand after Lang left, and Rick Owens, again, in a slightly altered form.

(Disclosure: I previously worked for Im.) He also attached them liberally to his clothes purely as design elements to create a look that was industrial and militaristic. It’s an approach echoed in buzzed-about young brands such as Hood By Air and Craig Green . His use of bondage references, meanwhile, added an aggressive edge that was sexy without being about simply showing skin. Recently, when Taylor Swift made headlines by wearing a harness as part of an outfit, she was following Lang’s lead, whether she knew it or not. A classic Langian mashup (Robert Mecea / AP Photo) His pioneering use of technical fabrics has had an immense impact on fashion. He would back silk with nylon, for instance, or use textiles blended with metal to get unique textures. In his runway shows, he would juxtapose technical with natural , shiny with opaque, luxe with cheap. (Lang’s long-time collaborator, Melanie Ward , undoubtedly deserves some of the credit too.) It’s all territory designers are still exploring. “When you think about his sense of the role that tech fabrics would play in fashion, it’s huge,” says Arbuckle.

“At that point in time, people thought about them as utilitarian, and think about where we are today—it’s such an important part of fashion.” All of these innovations gave the designers that followed in Lang’s wake a new conception of how fashion could be done. Even some of the most prominent and supremely creative designers working today owe Lang a debt. “Without Helmut Lang there would be no Céline, no Raf,” Bernard Wilhelm, a German fashion designer, told i-D . “I’ve heard from people working at different fashion houses that there is always a Helmut Lang piece hanging and it’s right there to be copied.” * * * Since Lang departed his label, retiring to a home in East Hampton, he’s traded fashion for art. In February 2010, a fire wrecked part of his New York studio, and along with it a portion of his clothing archive. As Lang looked through the damaged clothing to find what was salvageable, he had the idea to destroy the rest of it himself. Thankfully he donated a large portion to 18 museums around the world, but the remainder he shredded, and formed into sculptures.

25 years of work, combined with pigment and resin, became eery, elongated trunks , resembling birch trees, some of which appear blackened by fire. A photo posted by Sperone Westwater (@speronewestwater) on Feb 19, 2015 at 1:26pm PST The obvious downside of his decision is that it’s difficult to find an extensive collection of his clothes. One of the best resources may, in fact, be a 25-year-old stylist and fashion collector named David Casavant. During more than a decade of collecting, Casavant has amassed an archive of several thousand pieces—mostly menswear. Originally it served as a resource for stylists, but lately it’s become a place for celebrities, such as Kanye West and Rihanna , to pull items for photo shoots and events. There are only two designers Casavant collects in large quantities: Raf Simons and Helmut Lang. “You can definitely see Helmut’s influence today in everything really,” Casavant tells Quartz. “He changed the idea of what luxury is.

He looked at everything, from military to how people were already dressing on streets to utility wear and uniforms.” Visiting Casavant’s collection, which is housed in his Manhattan apartment, is like taking a trip through recent fashion history. He has iconic pieces, such as a green version of the tank-top with the nipple cut-out that featured on the runway and in photographer Juergen Teller’s famous ads for Lang. He has bomber jackets, and shiny astronaut pants, as well as Lang’s precisely tailored suits and numerous pairs of jeans. The infamous nipple tank (Pierre Verdy / AFP / Getty Images) “When you get [Lang’s clothes] it’s like you want to look at all of it, you know? The tag is cool, the details are cool, you see what it’s lined with, you see what the cuffs are made out of, you see the bondage details—if it has it,” Casavant says. “I didn’t even necessarily want it for me to wear. I wanted to have it, and just because I like clothes, I wanted to have them to do something with one day, maybe, is what I always thought.” What’s notable is how modern it all looks.

Pieces from the late ’90s would still work on any runway today, and the magazines and stylists that continue to pull Lang’s pieces from Casavant’s archive attest to that. A photo posted by David Casavant (@davidcasavant) on Jul 23, 2015 at 10:31am PDT The clothes would also fit easily into a real person’s wardrobe. “Some designers are great at the shock factor, but I think he was someone who could really provide the excitement and the news, and at the same time they were wearable clothes,” Arbuckle says. “You wanted to wear the clothes.” * * * The revolution Lang caused in fashion didn’t end with his clothing. When New York relaunched a dedicated men’s fashion week this year, it was largely in response to a calendar that Lang singlehandedly created. Not wanting to follow the European shows, he moved up the date of his spring-summer 1999 show to precede Europe. Other brands, including Calvin Klein, immediately followed suit. By the next season, all the New York shows had adopted Lang’s schedule.

Menswear was forced to join as it didn’t have its own week, even though the timing was awkward . His marketing was similarly groundbreaking. He was the first designer to live stream a runway show on the internet, and the first to advertise on taxi cabs . The ads he made with Jenny Holzer, an American conceptual artist, remain so popular that they routinely circulate on social platforms, such as Instagram and Tumblr. A photo posted by Emma Hope Allwood (@emmahopeall) on Jul 29, 2015 at 3:34pm PDT Paradoxically, Lang’s huge sway didn’t always translate into equally sizable earnings. Sales at his brand plunged in the years before he left, though Prada probably deserves to share the blame. When the Italian house bought 51 percent of Helmut Lang in 1999, the company was doing upwards of $100 million in revenue. By 2004, that total had plunged to about $30 million . The New York Times reported that sales fell after Prada cut back significantly on the denim line, which accounted for more than half of revenue, as it sought to turn the brand toward sales of pricey handbags and shoes.

Others evidently felt Prada didn’t invest enough time in developing the brand properly. In 2005, Lang left, and Prada sold the company the next year to Link Theory holdings, the Japanese maker of Theory clothing and subsidiary of Fast Retailing, which owns Uniqlo. Still, Lang was a powerful force in the industry even as he stepped back from it, and his hold undeniably continues. One of the most prevalent, commercial looks of today is a sporty, diluted version of what Lang did. It’s even the prevailing aesthetic at the current Helmut Lang, which has essentially become a high-end mass-market label. Angelo Flaccavento, a fashion critic, complained about the lack of originality he saw on the New York runways at the fall shows this past February. “This week in New York, you could almost tick the boxes as the models strolled by: Céline, done; Vuitton, done; Dior, done. And so on. Not to mention another favorite hunting territory for American designers: Helmut Lang’s industrial/minimalist aesthetic,” he wrote.

If nothing else, it’s evidence that Lang created a design language that was so tuned into the way people dress—and want to dress—that it’s still in use today. It’s so consistently present it’s become a fixed element amid the non-stop motion of the fashion world. New designers may come out and perform their parts on stage; Helmut Lang’s work is now part of the stage itself. Helmut Lang Helmut Lang By Thomas Hecht Helmut Lang Biography Fashion Designer, Helmut Lang (1956- ), was born on 10 March 1956 in Vienna, Austria. When he was three years old, his parents divorced; he then lived with his grandfather, who worked as a shoemaker in a village near Salzburg. Lang first took commercial courses at a local trade academy before he switched over to fashion design. Lang opened his first studio in 1977, when he was twenty-one years old, and designed T-shirts and jackets. He soon started to specialize in avant-garde fashion; by the mid-1980s, his women's ready-to-wear collections had become well known in his home country.

He launched his first catwalk show in Paris in 1986, nine years after the opening of his first atelier. His minimalist approach was labeled as deconstructionist and avant-garde. In 1987 he also began to design men's wear, and promoted an essentially pure urban style. After Lang's success in Paris, he divided his time between his design studio in Vienna and his consulting agency in Paris. Lang was appointed professor of fashion design at Vienna's Universität für Angewandte Kunst, a college-level institution for the applied arts, in 1993. Helmut Lang's Brand Lang's core brand was the Helmut Lang Men's and Women's Collections. The brand was extended in 1995 with the addition of Helmut Lang underwear and shoes, followed by Helmut Lang jeans in the following year, as well as Helmut Lang protective eyewear and accessories. The designer achieved a high level of recognition through these extensions of his brand. He moved to New York in 1998 in order to get an international reputation in the fashion world and entered into a collaborative relationship with the Italian luxury brand Prada in 2000.

Lang also launched his first perfumes in 2000. Minimalism and Marketing Lang's minimalist approach was also apparent in his marketing strategy. The best example was the appearance of his Internet web page in the early 2000s. At first glance, a visitor might have thought that the designer's web domain was under construction. The page was almost completely empty; several small links provided access to his current ready-to-wear collections for women and men, accessories lines, store information, press images, and perfumes. Lang's marketing created a set of futuristic images. For example, his web page for women's perfumes featured a series of distinctive phrases in large capital letters that scrolled rapidly past the visitor's eyes: I walk in-I see you-I watch you-I scan you-I wait for you-I tease you-I breathe you-I smell you on my skin. His advertising was also minimal, with simple product shots that appeared surprisingly clean and therefore remarkable. Lang tried to make the reader "breathe" the fashionable quality in his advertising. The caption for an advertising campaign for Helmut Lang Eyewear read, "To promote an intellectual and fearless appearance," showing a "mug shot" of a model's face.

While other brands put the designer himself in the foreground to promote collections, Lang avoided attracting attention to himself. When Lang was asked in an interview what his label represented, he replied, "It says Helmut Lang on it. Everything I know is in it." His catwalk shows were presented in a clean, urban minimalist style. In fact, his 1998 collection was shown only over the Internet instead of being displayed in a physical setting. Claire Wilcox's introduction to Radical Fashion described Helmut Lang clothing at its simplest, as defined by a sophisticated interpretation of utilitarian wear. His clothes certainly resembled a uniform for urban living in the early twenty-first century. Lang had a preference for combining unusual materials: he blended cheap materials with expensive fabric, recycled fabrics with high technology. The fabric combinations varied from shiny to matte; they were often a mixture of natural fibers and synthetics. Lang sprayed silver and black varnish on denim in his 2000 collection, transforming basic utility into futuristic objects. His designs did not appear loud, but clearly reflected an androgynous style. A clinical look resulted from a mixture of deconstructionist and classicist forms that united contradictory elements.

In "Imagining Fashion," Alistair O'Neill suggested that Lang's work could be understood as an attempt to liberate repressed attributes by concealing them under the supposedly unreadable surface of clothing. O'Neill took the advertising "Man in a Polyester Suit" as an example of Lang's suggestion that the surface of clothing is unreadable. O'Neill suggested that the phallic quality of the image reverberated in subsequent Lang campaigns, but it was the tension between the standard exterior and spectacular interior that came to the fore. Androgyny Although the era of minimalist fashion design ended in the early twenty-first century, Helmut Lang still used minimalist codes in his designs. His androgynous approach to fashion mirrored the clear distinctions between male and female dress in traditional clothing. Lang was stereotyped as the "King of Fashion Minimalism." It is true that the concept was as important to him as the clothes themselves. This concept was also reflected in his color palette, which mixed noncolors with flashy shades to produce a futuristic effect. See also Brands and Labels ; Fashion Advertising ; Fashion Marketing and Merchandising ; Jeans ; Unisex Clothing . Bibliography O'Neill, Alistair.

"Imagining Fashion-Helmut Lang and Maison Martin Margiela." In Radical Fashion. Edited by Claire Wilcox. London: V & A Publications, 2001. Wilcox, Claire. Radical Fashion. London: V & A Publications, 2001. Internet Resource Helmut Lang Website. 2004. Available from . Was this page useful?

Question: Fashion designer Helmut Lang was born in which country?
Answer: Austria