“No Regrets.” Helmut Lang Speaks About His “Living Archive” Intervention at the MAK in Vienna and His Work in Fashion
Hope can take many forms—an encouraging smile, the head of a crocus peeping through dirt to signal spring’s arrival—and appear in unexpected places, such as Mr. Helmut Lang’s art-filled Instagram feed. To see fashion images flash up in his stories was golden, like finding a long-sought-for face in a crowd.
Lang has always preferred privacy to the spotlight, so it’s ironic that since he left his label in 2005 to return to his art practice—he always meant fashion to be a temporary pursuit, he explained in a recent email exchange—his presence was everywhere present in fashion. No two designers have had more influence on the last decade of fashion than Martin Margiela and Helmut Lang, men who stayed resolutely true to themselves. At one point, a few years ago, Langisms were so copious and so blatant they were almost shocking. These homages or borrowings, which continue, extend well beyond aesthetics, and touch upon innovations the designer made in relation to casting, show format, use of technology, brand building, and advertising.
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What makes Lang’s work so appealing? Some would say its modernity or industrial edge. Having selected and digitized dozens of shows as part of the Vogue Runway Archive Project, all of which have their own merits, I can say that few are so purely about concept and design that they seem to escape time as Lang’s. Having asked the artist to describe his work, his team directed me to these lines from the curator Olivier Saillard’s text for Louis Vuitton: Art, Fashion, and Architecture: “It has been incorrectly said of Lang that he spearheaded the minimalist trends that defined the ’90s. His work is really more about essentialism.” I would argue that there is an element of wild romanticism running through it as well.
Now you can form your own opinions, guided by those of Lang himself, who has staged an intervention at the Helmut Lang Archive at the MAK in the designer’s native Vienna. Lang made donations of his fashion work to many museums, but he gave to the Museum of Applied Arts more than 9,000 artifacts related to his company’s brand development and identity from 1986 to 2005. There have been temporary exhibitions of this material in the room permanently dedicated to the collection; this is the first time Lang himself has been involved in interpreting them. It should be underlined that this is not an exhibition per se, but an intervention intended to break from standard museum practice to conjure a “living archive.” That’s achieved by presenting objects as artifacts alongside new work created for this project: collaged artworks and a special video edit using pieces in the permanent collection. “The idea of the living archive,” Lang explains, “is not only about preserving the facts and data but the spirit which gave my work its gravitas.”
