Exclusive: Helmut Lang on Helmut Lang

VIENNA — Helmut Lang was never a man of many words. You’ll understand why if you have the good fortune to visit “Séance de Travail 1986–2005," the retrospective of his career in fashion — the first of its kind anywhere — which just opened at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts in his hometown Vienna.

There is so much that does Lang’s talking for him, all of it drawn from the “living archive” he donated to MAK in 2011 after a fire in his studio incinerated everything else. The museum’s inventory runs to more than 10,000 items: design drafts, advertising proofs, finished campaigns, prototypes, samples, packaging, artist collaborations, photographs, show videos, press clippings, documentation of behind-the-scenes work processes and more.

But that institutional list doesn’t do justice to how idiosyncratic — how personal — the exhibition is. It all comes from him. Maybe that’s why he was prepared to talk about it, in a rare moment of candour.

“If you don’t see things for a while, they suddenly become precious again,” he says.

Lang’s fashion work and his subsequent career as an artist are underpinned by his conviction that “Alles Gleich Schwer” or “everything has an equal weight.” As MAK curator Marlies Wirth says, “Whether it’s a good suit or the second proof of an advertisement, it’s all worthwhile. One without the other would never have come to this legacy as it is now. Everything counts, not only each person’s work but also all the strategies.” Which is why the exhibition’s embrace of the macro (a reconstruction of Lang’s New York store space) and the micro (the rubber band printed HELMUT LANG for use as a backstage bracelet) is so seamlessly fascinating.

Again, it all comes from him, with a little help from Vienna. He left for New York in 1998, and he’s never been back. Lang doesn’t fly (hence our conversation took place in the digital ether). But the influence lingers, perhaps because Vienna inculcated a kind of contrariness in him in response to its stolidity, its imperial opulence. Like the writers and artists he names. “Franz West, Thomas Bernhard, Robert Musil, Elfriede Jelinek — the list is endless — they were all kind of nourished by their circumstances but expressed it in their opposition because they couldn’t live in that climate. There’s a certain climate in Vienna which is not that radically supportive of outstanding ideas.”

I never imagined Lang would do anything like this, that he would be prepared to explore his past in this way, to make it so grandly physical but also curiously intimate. Neither did he. For all that his rigorous aesthetic, and the dynamic, organic way he expressed it, reshaped fashion in the ’90s and inspired generations of designers who came after, he has remained a shadowy, enigmatic figure. No books, no retrospectives, no documentaries, no official chronology or encomia of any kind. Until now. Lilli Hollein assumed the position of MAK director in September 2021. A Lang exhibition was her priority. “The only relevant Austrian fashion,” she called it. By October, she was already knocking on the door of his house on Long Island, where he has been keeping his head down since 2005 when he quit fashion, working in his studio, tending to his garden and his animals. The original notion may have been retirement. It didn’t stick.

Hollein’s timing wasn’t great. Lang and his partner Edward Pavlick had just moved house, which included the studio and the farm along with their personal belongings. “Lilli said, ‘We really want to honour you.’ I said, ‘Can you please do this after I’m dead? Because I’m busy with my artwork and my life and other stuff, I’m really not into it.’ It was just not ready in my head.” She was insistent. She wanted a dialogue with a living artist. “You know, sometimes older women are relentless in their pursuit of their own happiness.” Lang laughs. (I wonder if he’s thinking about his deep and meaningful collaboration with artist Louise Bourgeois.) “So before this goes down some road which I would regret afterwards not having been somehow part of, it was, like, you know, I gotta suck this up.” But he set parameters.

Lang’s MAK archive is not really about clothes per se. The runway show looks that survived are distributed worldwide across 18 institutions, including the Louvre, the V&A, the Met, the Kyoto Costume Institute and the Musée Galliera. So Lang told Hollein he didn’t want to look at outfits on mannequins. Instead, he wanted some groundbreaking, technical way to display the very different materials contained in the archive, and he wanted a non-fashion curator to go with it. Ticking that box was Marlies Wirth, MAK’s curator of digital media, art and design. She and Lang clicked at once.

He was always defined as the apotheosis of minimalism in fashion. No designer who was ever described that way liked the label. Wirth settles on “essentialism” as more appropriate. It was her idea to use the reconstructed store architecture by Richard Gluckman as the scenography for the exhibition. That’s what she meant about starting from the design strategies. “It’s also an immersive experience for people, not only looking at archives but also literally walking inside originals,” she explains.

The few items of clothing that are exhibited are all fiercely emblematic of fundamental ideas in Lang’s work: folklore (the early corset jacket); surrogate skin (stingray, snakeskin and reflective materials); functional futurism (the “Astro Biker Jacket,” with a harness inside its silvery leather exterior which allows it to be hung casually, conveniently off the shoulders); and hybrid (a morphing of flight jacket and sweatshirt). You can trace the evolution of those ideas through any number of contemporary fashion collections. But the most provocative proposition was always Lang’s accessoires vêtements. Significantly, there is an annex devoted to them in the exhibition. His relationship with skin — revealing, concealing, with fabrics slashed or sheer — was always an essential element of his design philosophy. His accessoires vêtements distilled it to its purest form.

Lang de- and re-constructed basic items of clothing he called fetzen, a kind of German vernacular equivalent for “schmatte” or “clobber,” sexualising them to the point where they became fetishwear. “Not always,” he insists now, pointing out that corsetry, for example, is a foundation of folkloric outfits all over the world. “The accessoire is often just the outline of an idea which we are very familiar with, like a polo shirt or a cardigan, but suddenly, when it’s just a framework, it becomes a whole other artistic expression.” But the transfigured vernacular may be one of Lang’s most powerful contributions to the fashion lexicon. In the show, there is an item called a “reflective bra holster” from 1995. Though it’s a literal slip of a thing, it’s sewn from “polyamide, nylon, rubber/gum, metal, lace.” It haunts me.

The immersive heart of an already absorbing exhibition is a seating plan, scaled up and laid out on the floor. With a huge video playing at the end of the “runway,” there’s an abstract but eerie sensation of walking into an actual show. Which, in fact, it is. The Lang venue that will forever be ground zero for me was Espace Commines, a 19^th-century industrial warehouse in the Third Arrondissement, but there were no extant documents relating to that space’s seating arrangements so the séance de travail whose seating plan loaned itself to the MAK exhibition is Spring 2004, one of Lang’s last, which took place at the Tennis Club de Paris. The recreation was his idea. “I had always wanted to do this as an art installation, so somehow it made sense at MAK, because it’s interactive. And for people who know, like you, it’s necessarily reflective.” True, I stepped back in time to find my actual seat (second row, behind American Elle). But, more to the point, the installation acts as a poignant memento mori. That sensation is amplified by a couple of the sculptural columns (you could also call them folkloric maypoles) Lang formed from fragments of clothing that survived the fire in his studio, and a ghostly handful of chairs painted white that he called “Front Row.”

It’s been more than 20 years since the Tennis Club de Paris. Lang turns 70 in March. “I’m actually not really afraid of death, but looking along the front row in the seating plan from 2004, half of them are dead. When you look at earlier floor plans, from when I started in the business, it’s even worse. I felt almost stupid when I was in the studio and said, ‘Oh my God, half of the front row’s dead,’ talking like some fucking old person. It’s like when you call your younger relatives and before you can say anything, they ask, ‘Who has died?’” He quotes a Golden Girl (he doesn’t remember which one): “These are not your golden years, these are your last years.”

By which point, your whole life has taken on a retrospective glow. You don’t need a museum show to remind you. Gesamtkunstwerk has become a pop cultural byword for the total integration of life and art. There’s something about Helmut that has always felt entirely gesamtkunstwerklich, the way that fashion, art, architecture, music, graphic design and advertising (he was the first fashion designer to advertise in the National Geographic) all made this thing that so exquisitely fills the halls of the MAK Museum. When he launched his Fall 1998/1999 collection on the internet (another designer first), New York’s yellow cabs all wore a Helmut Lang lid (also a first). There are two in the show. One of them he found on the street. When he launched his jeans collection, he collaborated with the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation (yet another first). The selection of images used for advertising included “Man in Polyester Suit” which the Getty Museum Collection describes as “Black man in grey suit and vest with his uncircumcised penis hanging out of his zipper.” Unsurprisingly, Lilli Hollein doubts it would be possible for another designer to duplicate the same career arc today: the rigour, the radicalism, the fearless experiment.

The best news is that MAK is in talks for the show to travel to other cities. Lang is reconciled to the idea. “I see it in the artwork, how it ends up, how it is used and understood. It always becomes many lives. And it seems this also becomes many lives. Before, it was a piece of clothing which all kinds of different people were using different ways. And at least I have no regrets. It’s going to be what it is.” And what “it” is for Lang right now is “a really good display.” For instance, Richard Gluckman’s original architectural plans rebuilt exactly to their original dimensions. Or the media room, the dozens of screens playing every show (with its soundtrack on headphones). Kirsten Owen and Boyd Holbrook, the beautiful blonde Adam and Eve of Helmut’s brave new world! “Everything that was happening is just there, and that this in itself is starting to communicate without anything else is kind of remarkable because it’s nothing people like you do not know but it starts a conversation there, without anybody asking for it.”

Lang laughs that very particular laugh again. “And I think that’s pretty good. I think it is quite a groundbreaking exhibition.” Which was, after all, one of his primary goals when he said yes. “I feel it captures whatever it’s supposed to capture. You know, the work was not always planned out. It just rolled along. And we also didn’t do a book or anything from the past so far, because it all takes a long time. And I do like my day job.”

But Lang has also come to another existential realisation, one whose potential impact on the entirety of his work, and our appreciation of it, is compelling. “I think the one thing I realised during this time is that past and present and future are basically all happening at the same time.” A séance de travail is a work session, or a work in progress. For Helmut Lang, the show will never end. As he says, “The past is never easier than the present; the present is always the opportunity.”