Werner Schreyer

Werner Schreyer is an Austrian model, actor, and painter from Vienna who became an international menswear figure during the 1990s. Advertising for Hugo Boss and Ralph Lauren established his place in fashion, while comparisons to James Dean gave his image a cinematic association that followed him into acting.

Raised in Vienna’s municipal housing, Werner went on to build a working life abroad, including an extended period in Paris. In an interview reproduced by Metro Models, he recalled weighing modeling against acting early in his career. The Dean resemblance helped secure fashion work, he explained, though it could complicate his prospects on screen. He studied acting in France and worked with performers including Gérard Depardieu and Vanessa Paradis, repeatedly returning to modeling.

His photographic career brought him before Richard Avedon, Herb Ritts, and Mario Testino. Louis Vuitton cast him for consecutive seasons in 2012, with Alasdair McLellan photographing the campaigns during Kim Jones’s tenure. His fall-winter campaign became one chapter in a relationship he revisited fourteen years later, returning for the house’s fall-winter 2026 men’s campaign under Pharrell Williams.

Painting offered Werner a more personal form of authorship. He began working on canvases between modeling trips and studied at Zurich’s F+F School of Art and Design. His first exhibition, L’autre moi, opened in Vienna in 2012. Speaking to Die Presse about the freedom he found in painting, he explained, translated from German, “You are your own boss.”

The two professions eventually met in his fall-winter 2018 campaign for IKKS, which highlighted his work as an artist. Painting had become a public part of his identity, giving the man known through other people’s photographs a visual language of his own.