After a first show in Paris, at the Center Pompidou, in 1986, as part of the exhibition “Vienne. Naissance d’un siècle, 1880-1938″, the name of the Austrian fashion designer born in 1956, Helmut Lang, will soon impose itself in European fashion and upset its codes, after the radical Japanese of Paris (Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo) and head on with the young Flemish guard (Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester, etc.).
Going through a changing profession – creation of large groups, takeover of Dior and Givenchy by the ultra-gifted “bad boys” John Galliano and Alexander McQueen -, Helmut Lang will be described as an “intellectual minimalist”. Thoughtful, calculated, his fashion is minimal, as is the media presence of the designer, almost as discreet and invisible as Margiela.
In Claudia Müller’s documentary, he only appears in voice-over, the rest being taken from television archives. The wise testimonials of fashion editors, art curators, photographers and artists (Jenny Holzer, with whom Helmut Lang collaborated, as well as with Louise Bourgeois) complete the discussion.
meteor trajectory
Helmut Lang’s meteoric trajectory, the essence of his style, his singularities and inventions, the recipes for his success are perfectly described, as well as what was to follow, after a resounding thunderclap: at the end of the spring-summer fashion show 2005, without having warned the press, Helmut Lang announces that he is stopping fashion.
He sells his brand and decides to devote his full time to his work as a visual artist, which reflects his fashion: austere, but rich in materials and textures. It would be too quick to put it in the category of minimal art, born at the dawn of the 1960s, or even of conceptual art: “What I do surely looks more like a chic version of arte povera », laughs Helmut Lang.
If, like Karl Lagerfeld, Helmut Lang always looked to the future (“I am not sentimental, I do not spend my life dwelling on it”), he nevertheless secures his legacy by donating his archived collections to eighteen museums fashion, including the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he held a professorship.
The transition from his job as a fashion designer to that of an artist was to be accomplished through the terrible – and terribly symbolic – bias of the fire which, in 2010, took over his New York premises, where the 8,000 models and accessories that he did not bequeath, damaged by fire, smoke and water. He decides to shred everything and turn it into the transmuted material of his sculptures.
A way of illustrating with splendid irony the myth of the phoenix, as rightly remarked by the British art curator Neville Wakefield, one of the speakers in this very good documentary.
