VIENNA.- With HELMUT LANG. SÉANCE DE TRAVAIL 1986–2005 / Excerpts from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive (10 December 2025 – 3 May 2026), the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts presents the first comprehensive exhibition of Helmut Lang’s oeuvre. Based on the largest and only official public archive dedicated to his legacy—which has been part of the MAK Collection since 2011—the exhibition provides profound and unprecedented insight into Helmut Lang’s mindset and creative process, focusing on his radical vision of design and identity in the years 1986–2005. Conceived as a mixed media presentation featuring large-scale, site-specific installations, the exhibition transcends the conventions of a classical fashion exhibition. It highlights Lang’s role as a pioneer who embraced artistic strategies long before he departed from the fashion industry in 2005 to focus on his art practice.
Working across Vienna, Paris, and New York, Lang rewrote the codes of the international fashion landscape, establishing a distinctive aesthetic vocabulary that shaped not only the way we present ourselves, but also the way identity is conceived and communicated. Through campaigns, flagship stores, and collaborations with artists working in various mediums, he redefined the boundaries between creative disciplines, prioritizing emotional resonance over mere consumption.
With his radically intermedia approach, Lang challenged both established industry norms and societal conventions, fusing uncompromising rigor with a deeply human vision. Anticipating ideas long before they entered the zeitgeist, he translated them onto a global stage while maintaining a critical distance from trend cycles. What emerged was a quietly radical stance grounded in loyalty to character and the courage to experiment, resulting in a body of work that remains conceptually and aesthetically relevant to this day.
The curatorial framework of the exhibition is rooted in the MAK Helmut Lang Archive, representing Lang’s notion of the séance de travail, or “work session,” as a process of continuous experimentation, refinement, and renewal. Via the themes IDENTITY, SPACE, SÉANCE DE TRAVAIL, MEDIA & CULTURAL PRESENCE, ARTIST COLLABORATIONS, and BACKSTAGE, his oeuvre is presented as an interconnected system and as part of a broader cultural narrative.
Amid the cultural upheavals of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Helmut Lang developed a media-conscious aesthetic that deliberately distanced itself from the glamour, over-staging, and status symbolism of the 1980s. After launching his first collections and a made-to-measure service in Vienna, Lang presented his debut Helmut Lang Collection show L’Apocalypse Joyeuse in 1986 as part of the exhibition Vienne, Naissance d’un siècle, 1880–1938 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. With his austere, gender-spanning collections, he established himself as a central voice of the international avant-garde.
From 1988 onward, Lang replaced the classical elevated runway with the performative Séance de Travail (“work session” or work in progress), uniting mens- and womenswear in a natural, unpredictable dynamic of models and friends of diverse backgrounds, genders, and age groups. In raw, industrial spaces such as Espace Commines in Paris or the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, Lang created more than a new format that dispensed with the stylized theatricality associated with the défilé: The shows blurred into lived experience, intuitively merging fashion, architecture, sound, and the audience into a particular atmosphere that was as subtle and subversive as his designs.
In 1998, Helmut Lang moved his fashion house to New York and became the first designer to premiere a runway show on the Internet (A/W 1998/99), embracing the democratizing potential of the emerging “world wide web” and distributing CD-ROMs instead of front row invitations. The new website and campaign were promoted on over 1,000 advertisements on New York taxi tops, becoming a landmark feature of Manhattan. The only two preserved original taxi tops are now part of the MAK archive, one featuring Lang’s iconic Robert Mapplethorpe campaign. By moving his S/S 1999 New York runway show to early September, and thereby preceding the European presentations, he inadvertently reshaped the international fashion calendar, setting the schedule still in place today.
Together with architect Richard Gluckman, Lang developed a stark aesthetic for his flagship stores and perfumery on Greene Street in New York and the store on Rue Saint Honoré in Paris, where site-specific installations of artworks by Jenny Holzer and Louise Bourgeois made the fusion of fashion, art, and architecture part of the unique Helmut Lang identity. These design principles are conceptually translated into the museum setting: Recreated to scale at the MAK, the design elements from the flagship stores maintain their original functional duality and can be viewed as autonomous sculptural objects while being translated into an exhibition display for manifold original materials from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive.
The artistic collaboration between Helmut Lang and Jenny Holzer was initiated at the Florence Biennale in 1996, for which Lang created a scent evoking a human presence alongside her text-based work. It continued in the year 2000 with a conceptual perfume campaign, in which traditional product advertising was replaced with Holzer’s bold texts (“I SMELL YOU ON MY SKIN …”).
Starting with the New York flagship store in 1997, Holzer’s text-based LED installations were integrated in all Helmut Lang stores. An exhibition at Kunsthalle Wien in 1998 connecting Jenny Holzer and Helmut Lang with Louise Bourgeois marked the beginning of a series of collaborations between Lang and Bourgeois that extended across art installations, music, and product design, reflecting a rare creative dialogue and long-lasting friendship.
Lang pioneered a form of fashion communication that embraced the unexpected, opening ever new possibilities for perception. By merging high and low without hierarchy, advertisements foregrounded a sense of transparency and intimacy gestures that have since become part of contemporary advertising across different industries. The “backstage” was revealed as a subversive space offering access to a community typically reserved for models, stylists, and insiders. Spontaneous and at times lo-fi, photographs, campaigns, and special items gave a glimpse behind the scenes, highlighting individual characters and the hidden labor behind the fashion spectacle.
