I was just wondering what Helmut is up to. I now there is something cooking, but his PR person I know refused to say anything saying his head would be chopped off. So I googled Helmut today, and I found this strange bit of news from fashionwiredaily.com Hmm, I'd rather Helmut do some clothes instead, because I used to like many of his designs, and I think that he went out amidst his apex.
Helmut Lang Speaks, or at Least Draws and Defines
Godfrey Deeny
September 14th, 2006 @ 11:39 AM - New York
Helmut Lang, the recent great recluse of fashion, has finally made something of a statement, even if it’s a largely visual one.
Lang contributed a 10-page story to the latest edition of hipster
Berlin fashion magazine Achtung, which hits newsstands this week.
Entitled “Helmut Lang Excerpts from the Long Island Diaries”; the
article is about one of Lang’s pet obsessions, German and Austrian
noble family crests.
The designer has an avid collection the seals of noble Teutonic
houses, and these form the basis of the feature. Everyone from Von
Uslar, whose scion Moritz is German’s hottest young journalist, to Von
Clausewitz - historians among you will be familiar with his famous
dictum on war, that it was the extension of politics by other means.
“I am not sure what to make of this,” confesses Achtung
Editor-in-Chief Markus Ebner. “But I love its ambiguity and the way it
looks.”
Though a modernist revolutionary designer, Lang was always noted
for his adherence to traditionalist gentlemanly etiquette. In this rare
pronouncement since his 2004 resignation from the fashion house he
created, Lang drummed up a didactic text that is essentially a series
of dictionary definitions of hierarchy.
The designer begins his intro with the meaning of pecking order.
For the record it’s “a hierarchy of status among members of a group of
people or animals, originally observed among hens.” Quand meme.
He then lists ten connotations for order and ends humorously with
the gist of count, “For the Muppet character, see Count von Count.”
Lang sent the mag some rough mechanical sketches of his own arcane
sense of hierarchy and several grey background photos of the red noble
seals.
Even by the standards of émigré politics and habitudes, his is a novel exile by any standards. Then again, so was his fashion.
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