Helmut Lang, advertising campaign, autumn/winter 1999-2000.ĭuring his career in fashion, Lang kept the art world close by with various creative collaborations with stylists, photographers, architects, and contemporary artists, such as Louise Bourgeois and Jenny Holzer. Lang’s more personal genre of minimalism and his preference to position himself as a ‘fashion outsider’ are now used to value his new output as a fine artist. His experiments with ‘outsider-materials’ created textural contrasts, mixing luxury fabrics with technologically-advanced and industrial materials. Yet, in Lang’s designs materiality was the starting point. And indeed, his use of luxury materials, especially by the end of the Nineties, linked him closely to other minimalist designers like Jil Sander and Miuccia Prada, whose work shared the key features: simplicity and functionality. Besides becoming aligned with deconstructivism, Lang’s aesthetic was frequently described as minimalist. Lang explained the conception of his runway shows as ‘séances de travail’ or ‘working sessions’: they were pitched as art events, performing the mood of the moment in which his designs were not just displayed as commodities for sale but rather as clothing that was actually worn by creative individuals. His aesthetic was very much born from the context of his time, and was a reflection of significant social changes in the beginning of the Nineties. Whilst working in fashion, Lang spoke about his practise as being ‘against’ the commercial industry, as a part of a counter-movement that moved fashion towards a new kind of sobriety and away from 1980s glamour and excess. Donated to the museum by Helmut Lang in 2009. Helmut Lang, top and skirt, cotton, leather, silver metal and synthetic, spring/summer 2004, collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Helmut Lang, jacket made of bubble wrap, spring/summer 1999. The project that embeds Lang’s fashion archive into the art industry, forcing us to question the role of art to fashion, and – more pertinently for Lang – of fashion to the art world. The destructive fire triggered a contrary reaction in Lang: why not just destroy his archive entirely? This idea generated the art installation ‘Make It Hard’, an exhibition presented in 2011 at The Fireplace Project in New York and recently installed at the Sperone Westwater Gallery, also in New York. From 2009 to 2010, Lang donated a large volume of his fashion archive to museums worldwide and – in that same year – a large fire in his New York studio destroyed most of the remaining archive. This decision came with creative freedom, unencumbered by the functional and economic restrictions of the moving body and wearability. After resigning as creative director of his fashion house in 2005, Lang turned away from his former profession to focus solely on fine art. The narratives of his work emphasise the death of his fashion identity and point to his role as a new kind of creator. His minimalist and deconstructivist work is no longer presented on runways, but represented by galleries dealing in contemporary art. Helmut Lang’s ‘Make it Hard’ installed at Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York, 2015.
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