One of the most elusive names in fashion is Helmut Lang. Famously averse to doing much press and avoidant of collecting the numerous awards he won for his designs, he once told the writer John Seabrook, “I do not want to play the game”. His work as a fashion designer was just as mercurial: depending on who you ask, Helmut’s work might stand for something entirely different. The perfect T-shirt and jeans. Intensive technological fabric developer. Adapter of military design for the chic urban warrior. And, of course, the architect of 90s minimalist fashion. In truth, he is all of these things at once.
Born in postwar Vienna in 1956, Helmut was sent to live with his grandfather, a shoemaker, in a mountainous Austrian town at just five months old. At eighteen, he left home and cut his teeth making American style T-shirts, sweats and trousers that were impossible to find in Austria at an affordable price, employing a seamstress to copy designs from fashion magazines. These garments soon caught the eyes of his peers, which is when he first realised that he could design for other people and launched his line proper with a show at The Centre Pompidou as part of the 1986 exhibition Vienne 1880–1939: L’Apocalypse Joyeuse. It was a collection you might not necessarily associate with his more utilitarian later work, with garments constructed in larger, voluminous shapes and decorative details adapted from Viennese folk dress. Although his first collection on the Paris schedule for AW87 began to show the design codes he would become known for, such as a cropped silk jacket that drew on elements of both 19th and 20th century military design, it wasn’t until the early 1990s that the now-familiar codes of Helmut Lang emerged proper. Sheer, layered minidresses were introduced in 1990 and thermosensitive fabrics in 1991, and by 1993, he had introduced holographic garments, raw denim and his trademark slitted sleeves.
In 1994, generally regarded as his breakout year, he had been working with the stylist Melanie Ward for two years. By then, he had stripped away any excessive detailing and leaned into his use of techno fabrics, showing a range of plastic dresses for Spring-Summer and reflective jeans for Autumn-Winter. By the late 1990s, the designer was known for his pared back collections which subtly referenced military and workwear, combining innovative materials with humble cotton denim and jersey, creating a new approach to casual office chic. He dressed women like men, men like women, not just aesthetically but in how the garments feel on the body. Even as early as 1987, Helmut showed men and women on the same runway long before it was routine, working with models of all ages (often his friends) the look of which it was reported he called ‘broken’ – a mistranslation from an interview in German, but fitting nonetheless. The next year, he began to call his runway shows séances de travail (“work sessions”) in which these unconventional models would walk at their own pace around a rectangular catwalk, likened by the designer to a public square, as though bringing his designs from the atelier to a more elevated, curated street scene.
Decades before the advent of live streaming and seven years before YouTube changed how we interact with video, when he moved his work from Paris to New York in 1998, he released a video on his website instead of doing a live show, with press and buyers receiving a CD-ROM. Apparently many journalists were upset and found it gimmicky, but time has shown that he was ahead of the curve. The internet has revolutionised how fashion shows are consumed, with livestreams garnering hundreds of thousands of views, and the likes of Vogue Runway being a one stop fashion show shop for fashion fans and professionals alike. “We’re in the midst of a technological revolution,” he told WWD back in 1998. “We all know it, we talk about it, but we have to live it. The most difficult step is just to go for it.”
Mysterious yet prolific, his allure has inspired the creation of two archives dedicated to preserving his work after his own archive burnt down in a fire in 2010. There’s one in New York and another in Berlin, two cities where street fashion oozes Helmut-esque understated militaristic chic. Even when he left his brand in 2005 (Prada had acquired a 51% stake in 1999 and it was reported they did not agree on the future of the brand) he left on a very genuine high. Ask any Helmut enthusiast and you’ll hear that between 2003 and 2004 he was making his best work. Perhaps this is the reason why Helmut’s oeuvre, to this day, draws such wide fascination – by taking an early exit, he avoided ever falling out of fashion.
But where to start? Although often read as a ‘minimal’ designer, his work is as cerebral and complex as it is chic, so to first time buyers his work can often feel like a difficult one to penetrate. For he’s one particular designer whose work cannot be well-represented in grainy eBay pictures; it is in the wearing of his designs where they really come alive. We are, however, aware that it is next to impossible to try on all of the pieces from his decades-long career, so here, for the uninitiated, we take a stab at introducing the brand that is Helmut Lang.
The entry level pieces… Jeans and a T-shirt
Despite their more accessible price point, there is no Helmut experience that can compare to wearing one of his T-shirts with a pair of silk-denim Helmut Lang jeans. These garments hug the body in a way that marks them out as distinctly Helmut: tight armholes draw the shoulders back, straight cut jeans make the leg appear longer, more taut. Launching Helmut Lang Denim in 1997, this diffusion label was quickly absorbed into the designer’s main line, becoming a central component of his work. In an innovative move, he chose to display these more stylistically and economically entry-level garments alongside his more elevated runway pieces in-store. The designer’s obsession with perfecting these garments stemmed from his youth in Vienna in the 60s, where American clothing was much sought after, moving him to spend a career perfecting their shapes. Although one might consider the humble T-shirt and pair of jeans ‘basic’ garments, when it comes to Helmut Lang, they are nothing short of artisanal.
The one everyone’s referenced… SS04
In the early 90s, when Helmut Lang showed his now much-coveted sweaters with slashed elbows, the fashion press were not at all ready. In a fashion climate that sees distressed and destroyed garments as a contemporary sign of high fashion, narrow slits might seem rather conservative, but those little slashes – subtle suggestions of sexuality – were too much for some. Anna Wintour allegedly bought a few, but sewed the elbow slits up, and the press at the time rather dismissively called these designs “his sex-shop thing”. His iconic SS04 collection took this to the nth degree. Bandaged wrists, strappy elastic gun holsters, asymmetrical tank tops with holes cut out for the nipple to peek through, skirts almost falling off the body, complemented by a colour palette in rich, brash tones, it is a collection which has been referenced by later designers time and again – most clearly found in the recent trend of strappy, cut out jersey pieces popularised by fast fashion retailers like Boohoo and Fashion Nova.
Under-appreciated influence… Sensual Militarism
Helmut Lang was known for two things: militaristic and sexually-charged design details. But the coming together of the two in his AW03/04 show didn’t just sexualise militaristic details, but subverted the codes of masculinity embedded in these objects. Details adopted from developments in flight clothing took what he was doing with military codes to new realms. A pressure suit reimagined as a skirt or pair of chaps, verging on lingerie but balanced by the raw intensity of the strapping and tubing; a fighter jet safety harness becoming a fetishistic medallion; laser cut camo netting formed into a minidress. Where his work had referenced this kind of design before, this was a more overt, literal adaptation of military uniform akin to armour. Here the utilitarian details of war became soft, sensual and disguised as ambiguous ornamentation.
The deep cut… Elevated Hardware
An overlooked part of his production is the line of understated accessories that Helmut Lang began releasing in the early 00s. After Prada took a majority stake in the company, Helmut Lang started producing accessories, but these did not follow any traditional model. Formed from rubber, leather, steel and silver, Helmut Lang began producing luxurious utilitarian accessories, perhaps a Helmut-style solution to the pressures of becoming part of a larger company keen on selling bags and belts. These were deeply subtle designs, such as a stainless steel carabiner or a leather ‘aviator’ keyring that looks like a pilot’s emergency whistle, or his earlier sterling silver money clip, a thick wedge of precious metal worth a hell of a lot more than the dollars it was designed to hold. The most interesting thing about them is that unless you look very closely, you can’t even tell that they’re Helmut.
Text: Eilidh Duffy
Images from the book ‘Helmut Lang Dispersed by Joakim Andreasson’ published by Baron Books