DASSLER Adi (Adidas) (Designer)

Sport met fashion and music in 1986 when hip-hop group Run DMC recorded its devotion to streetwear on the track "My Adidas". Sweatshirts, track pants and trainers were appropriated by a generation of men and women who threw away the laces and decorated themselves with heavyweight gold jewellery. In the 1970s, Adidas trainers had been an anti-establishment fashion statement worn with jeans, but in the defiant, label-aware 1980s branding took over and an unsuspecting sportswear company found itself at the heart of a fashion movement. At the 1936 Olympics, Jesse Owens, a black American runner, won four gold medals wearing a pair of trainers made by cobbler Adi Dassler and his brother, Rudolf. They had seen a gap in the market for high-performance athletic shoes in 1920 and they started to build what was to become a label as important to street fashion as it was to sport. 

Also look up for Hechter, Hilfiger, Knight & Bowerman, McCartney, Y. Yamamoto