Alexander Wang

In the years following his namesake label’s creation in 2005, Alexander Wang became the de facto uniform-maker for a downtown New York City crowd affecting the M.O.D., or model-off-duty, look—but the ease of that quintessential Wang look came straight from the West Coast. A California transplant, Wang grew up steeped in genuine beach culture; he has never been a purveyor of fantasy. Instead, as he told i-D in 2009, he aims for something that’s even harder to deliver: “Clothes that girls want to wear.” This is the youthful mission that, no doubt, attracted the house of Balenciaga when he was creative director from 2012 to 2015.

Born in 1983 to Taiwanese-American parents in San Francisco, Wang grew up in the Bay Area and at the age of 18 moved to New York to study at the Parsons School of Design. He interned for Marc Jacobs, Teen Vogue, Vogue, and Derek Lam, then dropped out of Parsons to launch a line of unisex sweaters. “When Wang was photographed by The New York Times at a party wearing a sweater with an intarsia image of a girl smoking on the back,” Vogue’s Sarah Mower would write in 2010, “buyers came clamoring for the casual, downbeat clothes at newly accessible prices by the cool kid with the model friends.”

In 2007, Wang introduced his first full women’s collection. By 2008 an accessories line was added—and he was declared the winner of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund, with Diane von Furstenberg becoming his mentor. His tenure at Balenciaga was short, but it did nothing but elevate his global profile. Now he’s back in New York full time, eager to take his eponymous label to the next level.