When a blockbuster new Helmut Lang exhibition opens in Vienna on December 10, it will have been 7,625 days since the designer announced his departure from his brand. MAK’s show “Helmut Lang Séance De Travail 1986–2005” demonstrates how Lang, now working as an artist, is still influencing how we experience fashion—and not only with regard to what comes down the catwalk but also in terms of brand identity, as expressed internally, through retail, and via external communication. The museum is uniquely positioned to do all this as it is home to the largest Lang archive. Thanks in part to a donation from the designer in 2011, it encompasses 10,000 items, some garments and the majority materials (look books, advertising campaigns, Polaroids, proofs, tear sheets, backstage passes), that document the unseen work that went into building the iconic label.
One of the aims of “Helmut Lang Séance De Travail 1986–2005” is to fulfill the designer’s wish that MAK’s holdings constitute a living archive. “I hope it inspires others to have the courage to find their own voice,” the designer said in a statement. “The past is never easier than the present; the present is always the opportunity.”
Over the course of two years and with much creativity, MAK’s general director, Lilli Hollein, has been addressing Lang’s total legacy. The upcoming show in Vienna is a kind of bookend to last year’s “Helmut Lang: What Remains Behind,” an exhibition of Lang’s sculptures at the MAK Center’s Schindler House in Los Angeles.
Hollein says that the new exhibition is “more than [a fashion exhibition]. Simply showing Helmut Lang garments on dressed mannequins would not be the appropriate approach. Architecture, collaborations with artists—especially female artists—advertising, and dramaturgy—all of these are important elements to understand his enormously visionary approach. What we are showing is immersive in a very special way. We take you backstage, to the stores and atelier. You will intuitively understand the essence of his approach and why this brand was such an epitome of coolness and influences so many designers until today.” (Indeed, there is much evidence of this in the spring 2026 collections.) Curator Marlies Wirth adds that Lang addressed fashion in “the same way that artists would approach the work. So my claim is he was always an artist. He just did not call himself an artist.”
Organized in five parts, the exhibition winds its way through the entirety of Lang’s years in fashion. It opens with the designer’s history-making fall 1998 show, which was presented on CD-ROM. Speaking to me in 2016 about this breakthrough, Lang explained, “This was at the moment when I moved my company from Europe to the United States. It was, in many ways, a new beginning for me and for how I communicate my work. I sensed at the time that the internet would grow into something much bigger than imaginable, so I thought it was the right moment to challenge the norm and present the collection online. It was a shock to the system but a beginning of the new normal. In terms of the broader context of the industry, we made in the same season the entire collection available on a public platform, allowing consumers for the first time to get an unfiltered view of my work.” Like many firsts attributed to Lang, his embrace of technology is one we take for granted today.
The visitor continues from LED screen displays to see an actual example of the brand’s rule-breaking taxi-top advertising, a partial recreation of the Greene Street store, and photographic documentation of it. The importance of New York as a place is obvious in Lang’s work. More significantly, the city affected Lang’s way of being—or, alternatively, his way of being was perfectly in tune with that of New York at the time. “We all know that it’s a city that never sleeps,” says Wirth. “You walk not only when the light turns green, but you anticipate walking.” That restlessness and unpredictability helped shape Lang’s philosophy of dress: “You live your life, you should be ready for living your life, and the clothes should adapt to you,” she notes. “You should not adapt to the clothes.”
The centerpiece of the immersive Séance De Travail section is a blown-up seating plan printed onto the floor. Lang’s chosen venues were art galleries, where guests were sometimes seated neatly in rows; at others, they were crowded together in close proximity to the models. Building out this section are show invitations and 3,000 look book images digitized for touchscreens, allowing visitors to customize their experience.
Materials on display in the Made to Measure and Perfumery sections largely focus on advertising, including, of course, Lang’s famous “I Smell You on My Skin” project with Jenny Holzer. Of note here are the designer’s use of white space in advertising, the infrequency with which he displayed actual products or garments on models, and his collaborations with the Robert Mapplethorpe estate and a cadre of living photographers, each bringing a distinct view to the brand.
Sitting near the finished advertisements are layouts with handwritten notes. The idea, Wirth explains, was to allow visitors to “learn about the process. That’s the main concept of the show. Get into the mindset of Helmut Lang. Maybe try and get into the analog media history of how things worked when you didn’t just click a button in InDesign and had to actually send your layouts back and forth with a messenger and to test stuff.”
From there, the visitor progresses to the Backstage section. On view here are Polaroids of the design process and collection fittings that, the curator says, “show all the intricate hidden labor and collective work that goes into the whole thing.” Her aim, she explains, is “to bring to the foreground that backstage is more than just having access with a little wristband. It is a whole world of relationships, of stress, of exact timing, of preparation, of detail that goes into that collectively, before you then enter the runway with the finished look.”
When it comes to the actual garments, Wirth wanted to emphasize how Lang transformed tailoring from something traditional, bordering on outdated, into something dynamic. She emphasizes texture (the lace embedded in latex on “the 1994 dress of the year” and stingray bags) and the concept of adaptability that extended from garments to fragrances. Speaking of one of Lang’s signature jackets with built-in shoulder straps, she says, “It’s not only worn—it can be deployed.”
A subsection within the Media Cultural presence section is dedicated to artist collaborations, ranging from installations in stores to the selection of photographers.
“Helmut Lang Séance De Travail 1986–2005” isn’t just a fashion exhibition, and Lang wasn’t just a minimalist. Lang, Wirth says, “grew up in the countryside in Austria, and his grandfather was a shoemaker. Essentialism is a trope that we use to describe Lang’s approach instead of minimalism because it’s about the essence of things stripped down to their core elements. So [he was] looking at workwear or a well-made shoe from the standpoint that it needs to be durable, of high quality with good materials, and serve a purpose—to protect or make you able to do a certain profession. And then he translated it into his visual language.” Design for living, in other words.
Wirth makes a case that one of Lang’s great legacies is the “cultural insert, rather than focusing on product consumption or the brand itself.” This idea—that we exist as individuals within a larger social construct; that we are part of something bigger related to community rather than commodity—is an important one, especially in this time of societal division. Lang’s work continues to be important because it always uncompromisingly marries aesthetics to purpose and progress.
“Helmut Lang Séance De Travail 1986–2005: Excerpts From the MAK Helmut Lang Archive” is on view at MAK from December 10, 2025, to May 3, 2026.
