Helmut Lang

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.