The A–Z Guide to Helmut Lang

The groundbreaking, hard-edged history of the label that defined the 1990s—and is moving boldly into the 2020s.

Karl Lagerfeld is known to have said that only one or two designers each decade make a real impact on fashion. During the 1990s, one of those designers was most certainly Helmut Lang.

After the heady excess of the 1980s, the handsome, taciturn Austrian—an autodidact with no formal training in fashion—set the tone for the decade with his pared-back, industrial, and sleek vision for clothing. He built his peerless reputation on sharp tailoring, sensual, layered T-shirts, provocative knitwear, and utilitarian outerwear, all of which channeled a world anxiously looking toward a new millennium while embracing the encroaching promise (or was it a threat?) of technology. Lang’s clothes conveyed, with their hard-edged glamour, the cynicism of Gen X; in many ways it was the sartorial expression of the angsty grunge movement. Lang’s lasting influence is hard to overstate—not only did he shake up the aesthetics of the period, but he torpedoed long-held fashion conventions, from how runway shows looked to when they took place to the very mediums through which we experienced them. He was a true modernist, not looking backward for inspiration, but finding it in the here and now.

Lang retired from fashion in 2005, and has since immersed himself in a career in fine art. His brand still lives on, and has, over the years, gone through various designers. Currently, the label is led by Peter Do, who showed his first collection last September. “It always comes from a real place,” says Do of Lang’s commitment to functionality in design. “It comes from a uniform or a heritage piece. Each season I’m learning more.”In 2024, many fashion connoisseurs wistfully look back at that pre-Internet era of the late-90s and early-00s as a pivotal, evocative moment in fashion. When they do so, they inevitably yearn for Lang’s point of view. Do seeks to reintroduce the brand to a younger generation while honoring its spirit for the longtime diehards (of which there are many). “One of the things I want to do is get back to leading the conversation. He was a trailblazer—putting men and women together on the runway, showing jeans and hoodies, running ads on taxis or in , showing a collection on CD-ROM. But the one thing that is in the spirit of the brand is always looking forward. Not looking at what other people are doing. My way of bringing back the spirit of Helmut is for us to just do our own thing.”

Here, we look at some of the key elements and moments that defined his time as the most important man in fashion.

Lang was born in Vienna, Austria, on March 10, 1956.

Lang’s designs were revolutionary during his career, especially during the 1990s and early 2000s, but his fashion shows were disruptive in their own right. Namely, the way he sent out models in pairs, or how, instead of a catwalk, he would line the room’s four walls with seats and the models would wander the space aimlessly instead of the typical down-and-back trot. Also, he cast a wide net for his mannequins, including friends and nonmodels, and sought new, unconventional types of beauty; he was famous for saying he wanted his models to look like “broken dolls.” One stylist was quoted in calling it the “sexy, young junkie aesthetic,” which, by today’s standards may be unfortunate but certainly caught the mood of that particular moment—remember, this was a response to the glamazons like Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell, and their larger-than-life personas. As Simon Doonan, former creative director of Barneys, told “He casts his shows like a Fassbinder movie.”

Long before social media, or even style.com’s near-instant runway images, Lang did something revolutionary: For his fall 1998 collection, the designer eschewed an in-person runway presentation and, in its stead, sent out CD-ROMs of photos and videos to editors and buyers. Even more shocking was that the presentation was also available to watch on his website, helmutlangny.com. Let’s just say it wasn’t a hit. Anna Wintour and Suzy Menkes were displeased. “I thought the CD-ROM was a huge mistake,” Wintour told . “Nothing comes close to a show—there’s an atmosphere, a feeling; you see the clothes so much better.” The , meanwhile, complained that the details and nuance were lost in this newfangled medium. “I never said this would replace shows,” he told the newspaper. Instead, he saw it as a way to address the increasing frequency of shows and the larger audiences who wanted to see them. “But there are too many [shows] and it’s torture for people.” In retrospect, this move was farsighted. Long before anyone could truly comprehend how deeply the internet would reshape the fashion industry’s pecking order, Lang was out there, in front, disrupting from within.

Part of Lang’s appeal was the way he treated quotidian fashion items as design objects, denim being a prime example. His were low-cut, slim, and featured complex wash treatments, sometimes made to look dirty or patinated. They cost in the range of $200 (very high for the time) and, to many, he pioneered the then-nascent designer denim market. The category was so popular for Lang that he spun off denim into its own subbrand, Helmut Lang Jeans, which was shown mixed with his mainline—another unorthodox act. Perhaps his most famous pair comes from the Spring/Summer 1999 collection: plain blue jeans that came covered in paint splatters.

One of Lang’s most iconic garments was a 1997 ribbed sweater with small slashes at the elbow. There are few better examples of how, with the smallest of gestures, he could evoke something dangerous or illicit. Those slits provided not just a hint of skin, the bare suggestion of nudity, but were likened by the press to vaginas or crotchless underwear. Anna Wintour bought the sweaters, but had the openings sewn shut. “I was not ready to see all those limbs sticking out,” she told .

Another one of Lang’s quiet revolutions: flat-front pants. The 1980s were a time of bloat and excess, which went right to the front of men’s trousers. Voluminous pleats, like the ones championed by Giorgio Armani, symbolized a man taking up space with a focus on the crotch. Lang did away with it and his slim, streamlined pants were a revelation, moving us toward the skinny jean phenomenon of the early aughts.

During the early 1990s, when he was still based in Vienna and showing in Paris, Lang’s work was dubbed “the New Glamour”—less showy, more hard-edged and stripped back, with a touch of rock ‘n’ roll grit. He didn’t like the term. However, he did tell Amy Spindler of the , in 1994, that “it’s more mature than the glamour of the 1980s, when it was important to be sun-tanned, before we knew what the sun could do to us. Today it is being able to show you can play with sophistication.”

Helmut’s designs were startlingly simple—he took everyday garments like T-shirts and jeans and made them into runway staples. However, his focus on fabrics and fit were what set them apart, and those details were not always readily apparent in images. Almost everyone who’s tried on a Lang top notes the high, small armholes and the way they shape the body—imploring the wearer to stand up straighter and ever so slightly push out the chest. They also give the clothes their narrow, attenuated shape. “A Lang jacket cups you under the arms and squeezes you from the back,” wrote Cathy Horyn in . “It almost makes you feel a little brazen, as if you were wearing a terribly naughty leather-shop harness instead of a designer jacket. It is hard to think of another designer with this capacity for arousal.”

When profiled Lang in 2000, the title of the piece was “The Invisible Designer.” In addition to his austere clothing, Lang was known to be something of a mystery in an industry famous for self-promotion. He rarely sat for interviews and, when he did, he often gave gnomic, terse replies. He did not chase press but, instead, let the work speak for itself. Far from a showboat like, say, Oscar de la Renta or Michael Kors, he was a hidden force, somewhat akin to Martin Margiela or, many years prior, Cristóbal Balenciaga. He didn’t even attend the CFDA Awards in 2000, where he was nominated for the top three awards and won Best Menswear Designer—the first non-American to do so. Instead he sent the journalist Ingrid Sischy to accept in his place, upsetting the fashion establishment. The designer wasn’t out of town but merely a few blocks south, in his studio, working.

The American conceptual artist collaborated closely with Lang on a variety of commercial products, most notably advertising campaigns and sculptures that were displayed inside Lang’s retail stores. Holzer is best known for her large-scale installations of enigmatic phrases in plain, stark text. Lang defied expectations by using Holzer’s texts in place of traditional fashion imagery in his advertisements. (Another Lang coup: when he placed his ads—just his name in large, bold print—atop taxi cabs across the city, thereby branding one of the city’s most iconic symbols.) In 1996, just after meeting, the pair collaborated on the installation “I Smell You On My Clothes,” shown at the Florence Biennale, pairing the artist’s work with Lang’s perfume. Two years later a Holzer LED sculpture was the central component of Lang’s first New York store, in Soho.

When Calvin Klein adopted a suspiciously similar style of sleek, urban minimalism after Lang burst onto the scene, critics called out the game of copying, oftentimes in the press. So much so that Klein once famously showed reporters sketches of an asymmetrical fishtail hem skirt of his design that was dated before a near-identical version of Lang’s, in hopes of proving its originality.

In the early 1990s, before launching his own denim line, Lang was known to send samples of his work to press and potential store buyers packaged with a pair of Levi’s jeans, to demonstrate their versatility.

Lang is credited by many as being a driving force in the minimalist fashion movement of the 1990s (along with Prada and Jil Sander). The 1980s were known for sartorial excess: the froufrou theatrics of Christian Lacroix, say, or the oversized shoulders of Armani suits. Lang, meanwhile, came in with a stark, pared-back vision that was urban, angular, sensual, and pragmatic. His designs swept away the superfluities of the previous decade and, in the place of all those folds and rococo frocks, were unerringly modern clothes. They were, in a sense, items most people were familiar with: jeans, T-shirts, tailoring. They were cut close to the body, made from common fabrics, and often had a touch of technological edge to them. “Minimalism has always been Lang’s signature,” wrote . “But it’s a deceptive minimalism: Shapes, cuts, and colors may be spare, yet fabrics and details are wildly—if subtly—inventive.” While some minimalists err toward a romantic or whimsical vibe (think today’s LEMAIRE or The Row, for instance, or even Phoebe Philo’s Celine), Lang’s minimalism was stark, bordering on aggressive or melancholy. “There is a grim aspect to his clothes,” wrote Horyn in back in 1992. “Felt not only in his preference for black leather and wet-looking synthetics but in his hardcore disaffection for established fashion.”

There was a time—not even so long ago—when the New York collections were the last to show, after London, Milan, and Paris, sometime in November. That all changed after Lang moved to New York in 1998 and a few months later decided to show his collection to press and buyers in mid-September, before the European leg—essentially changing the entire global calendar. “The impact will be on everybody for years,” said Patrick McCarthy, the editorial director of WWD at the time. And it was more than just a matter of changing dates; it spoke to the country’s place in the global industry. “American fashion has always had this inferiority complex—everything everybody saw in Europe then turned up on the runways of New York. American designers said, ‘I don’t want to be known as some sort of copyist.’ Helmut Lang has sort of lit a torch to the whole process.”

The current creative director of Helmut Lang, Peter Do, commissioned poet and novelist Ocean Vuong to create text for his debut collection in September 2023 to be featured on shirts and tank tops. It was a callback to Lang’s collaborations with Holzer.

In 1999 Lang sold a majority stake (51%) to the Italian brand Prada, but the relationship was fraught and relatively short. Lang exited the company in 2005, and Prada sold it the following year to a Japanese holding company called Link Theory, which was later absorbed by Fast Retailing. Fast Retailing still owns it today, along with Uniqlo and other brands.

With little fanfare, Lang left the fashion industry in 2004 after presenting his Spring/Summer 2005 collection, and devoted himself to his art practice. It was a shock to the industry as he was essentially walking away at the height of his career and influence. Five years later, in February 2010, a fire in his atelier destroyed much of his clothing archive. While industry insiders were distraught over the news, Lang was inspired—he began to destroy the remainder of the archive and used the raw materials for an art show, . Lang has remained as mysterious as ever in his new life as an artist, giving few interviews and, when he agrees to one, providing sparse answers. He now lives between New York and his home in Long Island.

Perhaps one of Lang’s most famous, and infamous, garments was his rubber dress from his Fall/Winter 1994 collection. It was exactly what it sounds like—a simple sleeveless sheath made from a thin layer of latex rubber, with lace overlay (“Audrey Hepburn meets Marquis de Sade,” said the ). The dedicated nearly two pages to the dress alone, calling it both “demure and erotic.” Wearers needed to apply baby powder before wriggling into it. A production issue meant the dress was made in limited quantities, which, of course, only added to its intrigue. The designer said that it had “been in front of nearly every important camera on the planet.” For good reason—it exemplifies the foundational tension that makes a Helmut Lang garment so fascinating, between the simple and the subversive.

Despite his reputation as a modernist and a minimalist, much has been said about the sexual nature of Lang’s design. Or, as Horyn wrote in : “[Lang] has emerged as one of fashion’s most cunning guides, a minimalist whose powers of suggestion are often reserved for the most impure thoughts. Lang knows that minimalism without a rush of sin is just parochial. There’s always a hot wind blowing through Lang country, a whiff of something you shouldn’t do—but will.” Or, as he explained in : “It is not my intention to be particularly sexual. Of course, sexuality is a part of fashion, along with a lot of other things. It is important for me to make clothes fit the body very well but it’s the material, the shapes, and the colors that create a certain kind of sensuality, with a new kind of sex appeal. I don’t sit down and say, ‘I want to do something sexual.’ My work is totally different from fashion that tries to be glamorous.” Still, very few articles from the 1990s went by without referencing the way that, with minimal gestures, the designer could evoke a feeling of the erotic, the carnal, and the clandestine. “Even as Lang himself seemed the mildest of men,” wrote , “there was a dark, fetishistic, almost Hitchcockian streak running through his work, a kinky fringe.”

Lang showed his collections to the sounds of techno, the electronic music genre exploding in the 1990s. Its repetitive, aggressively stripped-back sound reflected his aesthetic. “He’ll do a long fluorescent band like on a fireman’s coat—first one’ll come out on a sleeve, next on a sleeve and the bottom of a jacket,” the critic Spindler told . “It’s very repetitive, like the music, but it’s also like an artist driving a point home.”

Lang’s garments were not decorative, but functional—the fashion version of Le Corbusier’s “machines for living in.” Superfluity was stripped away and, in its place, was a straightforward practicality. Lang’s designs had purpose: velcro fastenings for the perfect fit, straps that seemed extraneous but allowed wearers to shrug a coat over the shoulders. One coat, from Fall/Winter 1999, was based on a M69 US Army flak vest, and featured pockets and other elements for carrying various items with you and could be hung from the body via internal straps. In 2000, explained that fashion professionals loved his clothes for their, “anonymous, worn-in, deliciously world-weary grace and functionality.”

Lang was born in the Austrian capital but sent to live with his grandparents in a small village in the Swiss Alps by Salzburg. He returned to live with his father and stepmother in the city when he was ten and moved out of the house at 18. His time with his father and mother was a particularly sad time for the designer and he reportedly never spoke with his father after leaving his home. He remained in the city working odd jobs like bartending, and began his brand there in the 1970s after asking local seamstresses to make custom clothes for himself; friends asked that he make them clothes too and his career as a designer was born. In 1986, he was the sole fashion designer to be included in the seminal exhibition , an overview of Viennese modernism in the art and design worlds, which helped catapult his career on the global stage. “The Viennese are, on the one hand, very complex, very particular, and on the other hand there is something arch about their manner,” he told . “It’s hardly lighthearted.”

Lang worked closely with British stylist Melanie Ward to help refine his line and craft his image for 13 years, from 1992 to 2005. The partnership was incredibly potent and deep—in fact, many called the Central Saint Martins graduate the designer’s muse, and she is often credited as one of the preeminent figures of the ’90s minimalism movement, as she also worked with Klein and Jil Sander.

Lang’s shows were known for their sartorial provocations as much as anything else. Transparent fabrics, such as organza or nylon, revealed the body while bondage elements like leather harnesses were common design flourishes.

In recent years, late-1990s and early-2000s aesthetics have made their way back into the fashion conversation, and many of the lasting references have strong ties to Lang’s oeuvre. Technical or commonplace fabrics, streamlined silhouettes, sharp and deconstructed tailoring, small pops of color, designer denim, and new pieces that look vintage are all lasting influences from Lang’s legacy that have worked their way back into the current lexicon.

Lang’s designs were incredibly influential—the printed T-shirts, the slim khakis, the military-inspired outerwear—but more than that, he captured the ineffable mood of the world as it slid from one century to the next. He created covetable clothing, to be sure, but he also helped forge the then-newfound image of austere beauty.

Today, Lang’s influence is felt in “quiet luxury” (a rebranding of ’90s minimalism) and the love of gorpcore. Or, as Laird Borrelli-Persson wrote in in 2020, “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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