When Helmut Lang slammed the door on fashion in 2005, it was for good. There were no teary farewells or victory laps. It was an astonishing feat of willpower, considering how much good will the designer who defined modernity in the ‘90s and early ‘00s had from the industry. His influence is still visible today, just witness the thriving vintage market where his clothes fetch hefty prices, and the numerous “archives” that do a brisk business loaning his garments to be knocked off by other fashion houses.
Upon leaving fashion, Lang turned his eye to art, with a series of quietly unsettling works, early of which dealt with his departure in an oblique way, a shattered disco ball from his SoHo boutique, the chopped up wooden eagles from same, and columns of mutilated denim that epitomized his razor sharp minimalism (the first thing I ever bought from Helmut Lang’s shop was a denim jacket). Was it the processing of trauma, or a final cleansing, is hard to say. And that was that.
Until now. On December 10th, the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) in Vienna will unveil a new comprehensive exhibition “HELMUT LANG. SEANCE DE TRAVAIL 1986–2005 / Excerpts from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive.” This will be the first detailed examination of Lang’s fashion work and its deeply lasting influence on fashion today.
First, what’s not to expect. Don’t anticipate a garment retrospective. Instead, the exhibition promises to examine Lang’s process of building his brand on a visual and cultural level. Much of what we will see will be the bricks that built the foundation of Lang’s radical approach that has been knocked off ad nauseum by everyone from Raf Simons to Virgil Abloh to the Row; ads that show not clothes but art, starkly minimal store designs, New York taxi cab advertisements, the first ever digital presentation of a fashion show, and so on.
The imagery accompanying the announcement is rather cryptic, as befits Lang’s art of the reveal at just the right moment, but here are a couple of exciting things that could be gleaned from the press release. First, there will be installations that will partially recreate Lang’s radical store designs that were realized by the architecture firm of Richard Gluckman. There will also be lifesize projections of his shows, including the A/W 1998/1999 Seance de Travail that was recorded onto CD-ROMs (if you are under 30, google it) that were sent out to fashion editors. There will be various ephemera, ad imagery and objects, including the infamous NYC yellow cab top, artifacts that highlighted his friendship and collaborations with the artists Jenny Holzer and Louise Bourgeois, and yes, some garments, mostly those that straddle the line between clothing and accessories, another trailblazing aspect of Lang’s work.
In describing Lang’s influence, the museum makes the de rigueur nods to today’s fashionable notions; identity, gender, culture. It notes Lang’s pioneering practice of taking the garments of the everyday, which it rather dubiously calls streetwear, and elevating them into the realm of fashion. Arguably, Lang did exactly the opposite, he brought fashion down from its fanciful, insular, out-of-touch pedestal and gave it back to the streets. And yes, he did all of the above – blending genders by filtering his womenswear through a pragmatic menswear lens and embracing androgyny, by signaling queerness in his own way of subtle kinkiness, and by uniting disparate cultural notions into a unique vision of modern city life. And he did it without fanfare or posturing, in a show-don’t-tell approach that today’s creatively enervated fashion industry has all but lost.
I will leave you with Lang’s epigram on the archive he bequeathed to the museum, which inspired what will surely be one of the most interesting fashion exhibits of this decade. “The MAK archive is meant to be a ‘living archive.’ I hope it inspires others to have the courage to find their own voice. The past is never easier than the present; the present is always the opportunity.”
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HELMUT LANG. SEANCE DE TRAVAIL 1986–2005 / Excerpts from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive, December 10th, 2025 – May 3rd, 2026 at MAK in Vienna.
All images courtesy of HL ART and MAK.
