Fashion designer Helmut Lang was born in 1956 in Vienna, Austria. He 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. 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. 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.