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Portrait by Dorothy Hong

Red carpet fashion kills me—it’s so boring, so obvious,” says Alexander Wang. “When magazines ask me [about my inspiration], I say, ‘This season I liked new wave and shows like “Saved by the Bell.”’

But the 23-year-old designer can’t be spending too much time in front of the television; he has his own eponymous label, in partnership with his sister-in-law and mother.

Wang’s earliest fashion memory is from in the ’90s, when the then-11-year-old flipped through issues of Vogue while at boarding school in San Jose, a suburb of San Francisco. After high school graduation, Wang moved to New York City to study at Parsons, the design school that has produced fashion notables like Donna Karan and Zac Posen.

After juggling internships at Teen Vogue, Marc Jacobs, and Derek Lam in his first few years at Parsons, he decided he needed to focus on his own creative output. He freed a summer for himself and created a small knitwear collection. After an astronomical response and getting picked up by Barney’s, Wang dropped out of Parsons in the fall of 2005 to design his own line.

Wang takes familiar looks, sometimes regarded as trashy or kitsch, and turns them into something modern and luxurious, so “someone from the Upper East Side could wear it,” Wang explains. “You do the running shorts you wanted in the ’80s, but in an Italian silk.” His line differentiated itself in a market glutted with girly dresses. He recounts, “I felt like everything else…was so over-embellished, with lace and flowers. I thought, ‘If I see another rosette, I’m going to kill myself!’”

With nary a rosette in sight, Wang’s Fall 2007 collection was inspired by ’80s hip-hop­—the way Run DMC and b-boys rocked oversized bomber jackets, leather baseball caps, and gold chains. But the chic update comes with clean and graphic French styling. The result: tailored pieces in wool boucle and metallic tweed, but in unmistakably ’80s silhouettes.

And so, the man who now gains inspiration from a show about a school, ironically, started his successful career by dropping out of one.