The Legends

Designer / Tastemaker — fragment design

The godfather of the collab — before the luxury houses understood the street, Fujiwara was already engineering the architecture of hype. The Ura-Harajuku scene he seeded around 1990 ran GOODENOUGH on a logic that was new at the time: make scarcity the product and the community the marketing. fragment design's double lightning bolt then proved cultural currency could be transferred between brands — the Nike HTM line with Mark Parker and Tinker Hatfield produced some of the most significant sneakers of the 2000s, and the Louis Vuitton and Moncler work carried the same logic into European luxury. He didn't just collaborate; he wrote the grammar every drop-economy brand has borrowed since. Wear a limited sneaker today and you're inside a system he sketched in a small Harajuku shop.

Founder / Shaper — Stüssy

Scrawled his signature on surfboards, then t-shirts, and built the International Stüssy Tribe — the template for the entire streetwear collaboration model. By gifting personalised varsity jackets to a curated global network of DJs, skaters and creatives across New York, Tokyo, London and Los Angeles, he invented influencer marketing decades before the term existed. He proved community was worth more than advertising, and that a brand could be defined entirely by who wore it: the Tribe reached the world with no media budget and barely any retail. Supreme, BAPE and every drop-model brand after ran his blueprint. Stüssy left his own label in 1996; the architecture he built is still standing.

Stylist / Accessories Designer

A punk iconoclast who turned safety pins and found trash into high-fashion jewelry — proof that taste and attitude outrank budget.

Stylist

The quiet architect of minimalist styling — impeccable taste and restraint that shaped how the most collected houses were seen.

Photographer / Director — SHOWstudio

Founder of SHOWstudio; pioneered fashion film and digital broadcasting before the industry understood the internet.

Graphic Designer

The visual mind behind Factory Records (Joy Division, New Order). His graphics were famously reworked by Raf Simons for the 'Closer' era — where album art became archive fashion.

Art Director

The visionary French art director who shaped how the avant-garde was seen. His work on Yohji Yamamoto's 1980s campaigns — built with Paolo Roversi and Nick Knight — produced images as intellectually rigorous as the clothes: not advertising but arguments about the body, the garment and the image. His direction for Jil Sander set the stark, poetic minimalism of the era. Ascoli proved the art director was not the designer's servant but a co-author of the visual language, and that a campaign could matter as much as a collection. His influence runs through every fashion image that refuses to simply show the clothes.

Stylist / Creative Consultant

A London stylist whose precise, intellectual eye helped define the stark aesthetic of '90s/2000s fashion.

Stylist

A key architect of the modern menswear silhouette — Raf Simons's long-time collaborator and a de-facto in-house stylist for Prada and Miu Miu.

Photographer

A raw, punk-infused British photographer and key figure of the Buffalo movement who captured London's subcultures.

Art & Design Partnership

Mathias Augustyniak & Michael Amzalag — the duo behind the typography and visual language of fashion's most intellectual houses, blurring art, music and fashion.

Nike SB Founder / Creative Executive

The architect of Nike's entry into action sports — he turned a failed skate program into Nike SB by respecting core shops and pioneering the limited-edition collab model that birthed modern sneaker culture.

Founder / Creative Director

Co-founder of UNDEFEATED. In 2005 his talks with Tinker Hatfield produced the UNDEFEATED × Air Jordan 4 — the first-ever Jordan Brand boutique collaboration.

Designer / Educator

The most provocative of the Antwerp Six — wild graphics, political messaging, the '90s W&LT label — and later head of fashion at the Antwerp Royal Academy.

Designer

The Antwerp Six member who fused high fashion and sport — launching footwear in 1986 and later uniting football and fashion under his label.

Designer / Educator

An Antwerp Six member with a deeply personal, anti-commercial approach — he opened his shop Beauties & Heroes straight out of school and later taught at the Academy.

Designer

The most enigmatic Antwerp Six member — focused on upcycling and reconstructed garments, a pioneer of sustainable fashion before the term existed.

Photographer

She shot the photograph that ended the 1980s. 'The Third Summer of Love' — The Face, July 1990, a 16-year-old Kate Moss in a feather headdress at Camber Sands, styled by Melanie Ward — traded supermodel gloss for grain, daylight and a real teenager, and it reset the decade. Her 1993 British Vogue 'Under-Exposure' lingerie story detonated the 'heroin chic' panic and cost her Moss. When a brain tumour came in 1996, she turned the camera on her own surgeries. Glenn O'Brien: 'she was to fashion what The Clash were to rock — the purest and fiercest of them all.' The NPG holds the Face cover.

Photographer

The anti-glamour that became glamour. His first Marc Jacobs campaign — Kim Gordon in a violet dress, SS1997 — went against everything glossy fashion advertising did, and it became one of the most important photographer-brand partnerships in modern fashion: Victoria Beckham in a shopping bag, Charlotte Rampling nude in the Louvre, FKA Twigs and Cindy Sherman. He shot Björk and son in Icelandic water, Kurt Cobain early, decades of Vivienne Westwood. His rule, stated flatly: 'Every photograph is retouched, and everyone expects that. But I do not do that.'

Photographer

Two revolutions, twenty years apart. His exclusive 1996–98 Prada campaigns — Amber Valletta reclining in a boat on Rome's Tiber at dusk, floating in a lagoon — defined the house's image; several now sit in the V&A. Then in 2015 he did it again, building the campaign world for Alessandro Michele's Gucci. He started by photographing the Stone Roses for The Face on a 10×8, part of the same early-90s London scene as David Sims and Melanie Ward. The curator's line: 'Glen had two moments in which he created revolution in the industry — Prada in the mid-90s and Gucci in 2015.'

Photographer

The romantic counterweight to the clinical minimalists. From a single Paris studio he has used for forty years, Roversi shoots on 8×10 Polaroid with exposures so long the subject's presence deepens — 'maybe the soul is coming into the eyes.' He made his name on the mid-80s catalogues for Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto, then Romeo Gigli, Dior, Valentino and decades of Vogue. In 2022 the Palais Galliera gave him a full retrospective — the first it had ever granted a fashion photographer. His thesis: 'A photograph is always a portrait, and fashion photography is a double portrait.'

Photographer

A former car mechanic who assisted Nick Knight and then shot the campaign that defined an era: Jil Sander SS1996, Guinevere van Seenus holding a strip of pink wallpaper with no garment visible — art-directed by Marc Ascoli with M/M Paris, hair by Eugene Souleiman, make-up by Pat McGrath. Ascoli described it as capturing 'the spirit of the time, eschewing the glamour and excess of the Eighties in favour of something cleaner, leaner, but also more human.' From a half-dozen i-D covers in 1995 to American Vogue from 2002 and campaigns for McQueen, Dior and Calvin Klein, his is the technical precision of 90s minimalism.

Stylist

She co-invented grunge styling, then co-built a house. With Corinne Day she made 'The Third Summer of Love' (The Face, 1990) — sneakers with everything, a radical proposal at the time. From 1992 to Helmut Lang's 2005 retirement she was his styling collaborator and muse, and she shaped the early Calvin Klein and Jil Sander campaigns alongside David Sims and Craig McDean. In her own words: 'The clients were open and believed in us and our then groundbreaking vision.' Senior Fashion Editor at Harper's Bazaar from 1996. On the 1990 Moss cover: 'Everything changed. There was a new democratic freedom to express yourself.'

Stylist

The eye behind the most important Margiela-adjacent and downtown editorials. She modelled for Martin Margiela in the 90s, trained under Marie-Amélie Sauvé at French Vogue, then moved to London in 1997 and into the orbit of Self Service, Purple, Dazed and The Gentlewoman. Her defining commercial relationship was a fourteen-year run styling Marc by Marc Jacobs, and she has worked with Jamie Hawkesworth, Harley Weir, David Sims and Inez & Vinoodh. On Natacha Ramsay-Levi's Chloé: 'there is always the organic feminine.' Her register is daring and refined at once — exactly the Purple sensibility.

Stylist

The stylist who shaped how the darkest houses were seen. He has worked on every single Rick Owens presentation since the designer's first show in 2001, and styled Riccardo Tisci's Givenchy menswear from inception (c.2007–2012). His studio builds bespoke garments as the anchor of a shoot — 'the pieces we make in the studio are usually the anchoring' — and his references run to Sisters of Mercy, Joy Division, Ministry and Skinny Puppy. Discovered staging mock shoots with Corinne Day while studying sculpture at Chelsea; Fashion Director-at-Large at Love from 2013.

Stylist / Editor

Before she was editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris, Roitfeld was the stylist who helped Tom Ford reinvent Gucci. The 'porno chic' she built with Ford and photographer Mario Testino across the late-90s campaigns — smudged liner, sheer fabric, unapologetic sex — became the defining image of luxury at the turn of the century. She proved a stylist could be as famous and as authoring as the designer. Her decade running Vogue Paris (2001–2011) confirmed her taste as a cultural force in its own right, and she left to found CR Fashion Book and her own consultancy. She is the case study for the stylist-as-author.

Designer / Tastemaker — BAPE, Human Made, Kenzo

The other half of Ura-Harajuku. With Jun Takahashi and his mentor Hiroshi Fujiwara he co-founded the Nowhere store in 1993 — the originating node of Japanese streetwear — and built A Bathing Ape on a scarcity model the whole industry later copied. Billionaire Boys Club with Pharrell (2003), the BAPESTA, Human Made (2010, later the first streetwear brand to IPO on the Tokyo exchange), and in 2021 he became Kenzo's Artistic Director — the first Japanese designer to lead the house since Kenzo Takada, showing his debut in the same Galerie Vivienne where Takada showed in 1970.

Designer — Undercover

'We Make Noise, Not Clothes.' He founded Undercover in 1990 while still at Bunka, fronting a Vivienne Westwood-inspired punk band on the side, and co-opened the Nowhere store with Nigo and Hiroshi Fujiwara in 1993. Rei Kawakubo bought a deformed MA-1 from his 1994 Tokyo show, corresponded with him by letter for two years, and personally urged him to Paris — the night before his 2003 debut she toasted, 'To the beginning of Jun's fight in Paris!' His shows are inseparable from their soundtracks and their occult-intellectual vocabulary; his line on the work: 'Clothes have meaning. Otherwise it's just cocktail dresses and bags.'