{"id":957905,"date":"2025-12-07T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=957905"},"modified":"2025-12-07T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T09:00:00","slug":"being-modern-according-to-helmut-lang-is-about-the-right-mix-of-things-read-vogues-may-2000-profile-of-the-designer-here","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=957905","title":{"rendered":"\u201cBeing Modern,\u201d According to Helmut Lang, \u201cIs About the Right Mix of Things.\u201d Read Vogue\u2019s May 2000 Profile of the Designer Here"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cBeing Modern,\u201d According to Helmut Lang, \u201cIs About the Right Mix of Things.\u201d Read Vogue<\/em>\u2019s May 2000 Profile of the Designer Here<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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By <\/span>Sally Singer<\/span><\/span><\/span>Photographer <\/span>Annie Leibovitz<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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SCENE BUT NOT HEARD<\/strong>
\nActress and scene-maker Chlo\u00eb Sevigny personifies the Arctic cool that\u2019s best worn with Lang\u2019s designs. Sheer top, and skirt, Helmut Lang. Opposite: the elusive Austrian designer. Hair Didier Malige for Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Fekkai Beaut\u00e9; makeup, James Kaliardos. Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington.<\/p>\n

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\u201cScents & Sensibility,\u201d by Sally Singers, was originally published in the May 2000 issue of<\/em> Vogue.<\/p>\n

For more of the best from<\/em> Vogue\u2019s archive, sign up for our Nostalgia newsletter here.<\/em><\/p>\n

Backstage at the Helmut Lang fall 2000 show, a fashion situation\u2014not to be confused with a fashion moment\u2014has arisen. The world\u2019s hottest clothes hanger, also known as Gisele B\u00fcndchen, has decided not to join Stephanie Seymour, Claudia Schiffer, Tatjana Patitz, Cecilia Chancellor, and the other beautiful somebodies assembled on Pier 94 of west Manhattan, on the runway. Helmut has granted the likable Brazilian only one exit i.e., catwalk outing\u2014and she and her unkindness of handlers (does anyone flap more or squawk louder than a celebrity acolyte taking vicarious offense?) have taken umbrage and decided to exit in the conventional sense.<\/p>\n

Helmut\u2014who, according to Simon Doonan of Barneys, \u201ccasts his shows like a Fassbinder movie\u201d\u2014is unmoved. When Kate Moss was the hottest model in town, he made a point of using her only once per show, too. To wheel out the top girl more often would have seemed too much like going with the cheesy flow\u2014and Helmut hates the cheesy flow. Which makes the following stunt all the more mysterious: Appearing on the show\u2019s publicity sheet, along with the names of the parties responsible for hair, makeup, and music, are scent credits (for women, Helmut Lang Parfum; for men, Helmut Lang Eau de Cologne). How, observers wonder, could this icon of rigorous individualism have stooped to the industry\u2019s most transparent commercial ploy plugging an aroma that nobody can actually sniff? Does the emperor have no nose?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This question becomes all the more pointed this month, as Helmut Lang launches the aforeplugged perfumes on, of all places, the Internet. It\u2019s true that PCs have come a long way, but the scratch-\u2019n\u2019-sniff port has yet to be invented. So why sell scent that can\u2019t be smelled? The answer, of course, is that the launch of Helmut Lang perfumes is, among other things, a launch about a launch. It pushes to a logical extreme the principle that consumption is driven by brand awareness\u2014in this case, \u201cHelmut Lang\u201d\u2014rather than by product awareness. As Richard Gluckman, the architect behind Lang\u2019s stores and residences, observes, \u201cThe Internet launch is at one remove from the empirical experience.\u201d In other words, you are invited to take leave of your senses, literally.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time that Lang has tested the expectations of the public and the industry. He was the first designer to transplant a fashion house from Europe to America, in early 1998; once here, he became the first designer of note not to participate in the New York collections but, rather, to show his work on CD-ROMs and on the Net, thereby challenging the notoriously technophobic industry to get with it. Then, in summer 1998, he decided to stage his spring \u201999 collection in advance of the European shows, a breathtakingly bold move that triggered a frenzy of rescheduling by other, far more established New York designers (Calvin Klein, et al) that left the sacrosanct fashion calendar looking as distressed as, well, a pair of Helmut Lang distressed jeans.<\/p>\n

Ah, the jeans. Was there ever a cheekier act of fashion brinkmanship than charging designer prices for paint-spattered, dirt-colored denims? And yet, as ever, the industry stumbled gratefully in his wake. Lang\u2019s friend Kim Stringer, fashion director of Japanese Vogue,<\/em> says that on a Tokyo Sunday she must have seen 20 or 30 pairs of these faux-Pollock numbers walking around. \u201cI actually just bought a pair myself,\u201d she owns up apologetically. \u201cWhat can I say? They\u2019re the right length, right color, and the smudge of gold is in the right place. It\u2019s really elegant.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The emperor may have dirty clothes, but wherever he goes, fashion folk follow. Just try squeezing into Lang\u2019s shoe box of a boutique in Milan during collections week. Drawn by the dollar-friendly prices and first dibs on the new season Helmut Lang clothing is made in Italy\u2014a skulk of fashionistas makes for the Via Sant Andrea direct from Malpensa Airport and, fighting jet lag, melatonin withdrawal, and one another, shop. A seen-it-all editor in chief happily announces that a hot-pink T-shirt with extralong sleeves makes him \u201cfeel like an aristocrat\u201d; a super-glamorous Prada-clad editor scoops two suits and a jacket and declares that they\u2019re her \u201cwhole work wardrobe\u201d for the season. Men and women who have access to every garment in the world are going crazy for sweatshirts and jeans and pale khaki suits. Only once they have slaked their thirst for Lang do they cross the street to Prada. Perhaps it was the spectacle of this stampede that finally prompted Patrizio Bertelli, head of Prada and husband of Miuccia, to buy a majority stake in Helmut Lang in 1999. For Miuccia Prada, Lang\u2019s design sensibility is all about deceptive ease: \u201cHe has elegance, and when he is at his best a very specific detail gives an edge in a very simple way,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Fashion professionals love Lang\u2019s clothes\u2014\u201cThey\u2019re my uniform in life,\u201d swoons Cecilia Chancellor for their anonymous, worn-in, deliciously world-weary grace and functionality. \u201cHis clothes allow one\u2019s personality to come through,\u201d says Stephanie Seymour, \u201cand yet are original and have a distinct style.\u201d Narrow cashmere crombie coats come with dangling straps that double\u2014make that triple\u2014as belts and coat hooks and rucksack-type straps; straight-cut trousers sit low on the waist and are narrow and lengthening and never, ever cling to one\u2019s imperfect posterior; parkas with shearling hoods seem both sporty and angelic; and organza pouf dresses, in deep emeralds and amethysts, are conventionally pretty yet intensely modern. The artist Jenny Holzer\u2014Helmut Lang also holds great appeal in the art world\u2014describes his look as \u201cfunctional, effective, minimalist, and nicely stripped down. His suits have all the essential elements, and then there\u2019s something better, or worse, about them than there would be otherwise.\u201d In short, Helmut Lang makes knowing clothing for those in the know. \u201cEverything about him is secretive and for the cognoscenti,\u201d says Doonan. The woman on the street may admire an attractively worn-out pair of leather motorcycle trousers, but she\u2019d never guess their maker\u2019s name.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s the opposite of logomania,\u201d explains Lang. \u201cWe stand for something very different and modern, but traditional and well made, as well\u2014something that just feels right. Our clients rely on us; they know that when we put something out it\u2019s been thought about carefully.\u201d Lang is a handsome, long-haired man in his 40s who works in a black-and-white office staffed by attractive young people wearing the black trousers and white shirt favored by their boss. The effect is not one of fabulousness but of the grooviest gathering of architects one could imagine. What\u2019s under construction is the immaterial cathedral that is the Helmut Lang brand, and the current spire climbing into the sky is the new line of perfumes.<\/p>\n

Lang was first alerted to \u201chow much we are surrounded by smells, and how important scents are to all cultures\u201d at the Florence Fashion and Art Biennale three years ago, when he created an aroma redolent of sweat, starch, and skin to accompany Jenny Holzer\u2019s intimate narrative of love gone bad. From this malodorous collaboration sprang a heartfelt interest in the possibilities of fragrance and a partnership with Procter & Gamble. The results are surprising. His friend and perfume guinea pig, the photographer Elfie Semotan, says that \u201cpeople react very strongly\u201d to the new perfume, that they \u201cthink it\u2019s stimulating, interesting, erotic.\u201d To smell of Helmut Lang is, for a woman, to wear a scent that is old-fashioned, vaguely Parisian, and\u2014as Lang says\u2014\u201cquite voluptuous. It\u2019s a scent that is not on the market at the moment.\u201d Indeed, Helmut Lang Parfum has nothing of the grapefruitiness or grassiness of most of its competitors. Helmut Lang Eau de Cologne (pour homme), which is proudly worn by its eponym, also \u201cdoesn\u2019t exist at the moment\u201d and sits \u201con the borderline of aftershave.\u201d Lang sees these scents as \u201cthe beginning of a perfume tradition\u201d; he will, in the coming months, open a Gluckman-designed perfumery in SoHo to sell his wares in a non-cyber surrounding. A department-store boutique will follow, but the traditional retail market will remain quite selective: \u201cIt is not a mainstream commercial product,\u201d Lang says. \u201cI think it should develop slowly in the way that old perfumes did.\u201d He is particularly proud of the packaging\u2014a heavy molded-glass bottle with a European weightiness that is oddly contemporary. \u201cBeing modern,\u201d Helmut Lang theorizes, \u201cis about the right mix of things\u2014certain elements have to be traditional, certain things have to be new. It does not mean having no roots at all.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Lang\u2019s own roots are famously unpropitious. He was brought up by his grandparents in a remote Alpine village (think Heidi, edelweiss, yodeling), studied business in Vienna, and took up design with no real training. By the mid-eighties, he was showing in Paris and injecting Austrian ich weiss nicht was<\/em>\u2014lederhosen, horn buttons, wedding lodens\u2014into silhouettes that were severe, minimalist, and at the time avant-garde in their minimalism. Linda Dresner, the Park Avenue and Birmingham, Michigan, boutique owner, remembers Lang\u2019s debut collection in 1986 for its \u201coversize cotton shirts and some sort of lederhosen. There was some quaint twist that attracted me to the clothes.\u201d Christian Lacroix recalls \u201cvery elegant, very couture clothes. A sharp geometry was already at work, very neat and abstract.\u201d Jenny Capitain, the German fashion editor who helped Lang with his first Parisian shows, says, \u201cIn the beginning, he had two Viennese pattern-makers and Austrian fabrics. The quality was amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n

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SCARLET WOMAN<\/strong>
\n\u201cWell dressed and well groomed is the attitude of the time,\u201d says the designer. (And fantastically sexy, one might add.) Red turtleneck, skirt, Helmut Lang. Hair, Sally Hershberger for Sheer Blonde; makeup, Denise Markey for Club Monaco Cosmetics. Fashion Editor: Elissa Santisi.<\/p>\n

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The Tyrolean dimension faded out after a few seasons; these days, Austria is represented in Lang\u2019s work by old pals from Vienna who continue to model his sleek, sexy suits even though they have jobs as physicians and attorneys. But the quality of the clothing, and the cleverness of its fusion of the classic and the antic, is undiminished. Consider, for example, Lang\u2019s take on the current lust for all things ostentatious. Whereas other designers are offering precious furs and lots of gold accessories for next fall, Lang gives us ragged, wild shearlings in a golden-honey color that leave the pack far behind in terms of modern luxury and glamour. He makes a cocktail dress in pale carnation-pink organza that trails four strips of cloth like party streamers, and it looks grand, not girlie. He places a feather on a high heel, and it looks bold, not fragile. \u201cLast season, things were already starting to be very polished,\u201d Lang says. \u201cPart of the attitude of the time is that you have the opportunity to be very well dressed and well groomed. After the whole sportswear thing, it just feels very right again.\u201d His feel for what\u2019s very right is inspired and inspiring: Lang has always been an influential countercurrent in the mainstream of style. In the eighties he introduced a vocabulary of dressing\u2014downbeat tailored suiting, ingenious low-key layering (of sheer tanks, tees, and dresses), technofabrics for everyday (and easy evenings)\u2014that came to define the nineties. And if you want to trace the roots of this year\u2019s \u201clady\u201d look, just recall his knee-length silk-feather coat with matching skirt in blush pink from spring \u201998. \u201cI think he\u2019s a great stylist,\u201d says the designer Kostas Murkudis, who assisted Lang from 1985 to 1992. \u201cWhen you see the motorcycle stuff or the NASA things\u201d\u2014 space suits for fall \u201999\u2014\u201cyou know he\u2019s picked up on the right clothes at the right time and given them a new spin.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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This talent for spin manifests itself in Lang\u2019s marketing strategy, which, even after the sale to Prada, is entirely his own and follows his counterintuitive sense of what\u2019s appropriate for his brand. This usually means not doing anything so obvious as showing the product as such. When he wanted to launch \u201ca denim line with edge,\u201d his ad campaign was restricted to Robert Mapplethorpe photographs that bore no trace of his jeans. His taxi ads proclaimed HELMUT LANG with a postage-stamp mug shot or two of his Austrian model friends. (The new taxi campaign\u2014to be run on a thousand cabs\u2014dispenses entirely with pictures.) For his accessories line, he places a photograph of a messy pile of his feathery bags\u2014think fox in a chicken coop\u2014in, provocatively enough, National Geographic (\u201cthe printed equivalent of the Internet. All different kinds of people read it, plus nobody throws it out\u201d). Lang is not actually trying to reach the masses, however. He\u2019s doing what tickles his fancy\u2014and, in his overt populism and egalitarianism, doing that cool thing that involves avoiding the recognizably cool. It\u2019s a terrifyingly confident strategy that reveals an implacable self-belief. \u201cWhen it\u2019s a strong brand name,\u201d he says, explaining the Internet launch of his perfumes, \u201cyou buy it and you try it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lang\u2019s certainty about the value of his name has allowed him to forsake his corporate independence without losing peace of mind. Even after Prada\u2019s disastrous falling out with Jil Sander, Lang is unfazed about being in partnership with the Italian megacorporation. \u201cAfter I moved to New York, I had to make the decision to go to the next important level,\u201d he says. \u201cI always wanted a partner to take care of the business side\u2014my soul was not attached to it. Merging with Prada was an acknowledgment that they know how to do it and on which level of quality it has to be performed.\u201d With Patrizio Bertelli\u2019s know-how and capital, new Helmut Lang boutiques are now on Gluckman\u2019s drawing boards for London, Los Angeles, Paris, and various cities in the Far East; and the Milan store will soon move to a more capacious location. In addition to the perfumerie, Lang plans to open a small made-to-measure salon in SoHo from which he will design one-off looks and customize ready-to-wear pieces for a perfect fit. This venture\u2014the opposite of his impersonal Internet exploits\u2014promises to be an ideal outlet for his talent for modern tailoring: \u201cIt has nothing to do with couture,\u201d Lang says, \u201cwhich to me is old-fashioned. Luxury has been defined differently in every decade. It\u2019s time to define it anew.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Housewares also lie in the future\u2014 \u201csomething very strong and very high quality; it\u2019s still good to have handwoven linen\u201d\u2014but for now the real benefit of the Prada sale is the breathing space it affords the designer. \u201cThe last four or five years were really crazy,\u201d Lang says. \u201cNow I concentrate on the artistic stuff, and that gives me enough room for life.\u201d In his mind, creativity and a low-key existence go hand in hand: \u201cYou have to know what\u2019s going on in life to create fashion. You have to have a normal life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Normal life, these days, involves a loft in downtown New York and a $15 million property in East Hampton that he snatched from under the nose of Jerry Seinfeld. You won\u2019t see photo spreads of these places in any magazine, because Helmut Lang likes to keep his private life private: \u201cI\u2019m not from this old school of designers. Basically, if you allow everything, you\u2019re always on a promoting tour.\u201d Lang prefers the company of a loyal and long-standing set of friends with whom he can eat McDonald\u2019s Quarter Pounders\u2014\u201cmaybe three times a week,\u201d according to his Viennese internist-friend and model Wolfgang Ruisz\u2014and tour the Chelsea flea markets in search of old books about painting and botany. It seems that after his peripatetic European years, when he divided his time between Vienna and Paris, Lang has settled down. Certainly, the appeal of Austria hasn\u2019t been increased by the country\u2019s recent turn to the far, far right. \u201cWhat is there to say?\u201d he mutters despairingly when the subject of Jorg Haider is raised.<\/p>\n

However much his day-to-day life is now rooted in the U.S., Helmut Lang\u2019s sense and sensibility will never be deracinated from Mitteleuropa. \u201cHe has the Austrian habit of being very cautious about everything,\u201d says Ruisz. \u201cHe wants everything about his clothes to work.\u201d More mystically, it is perhaps Lang\u2019s inherited sense of Central European melancholy and anonymity\u2014think Kafka, think Musil\u2014that enables him to evolve, with a matchless prescience, a brand without borders that resonates so mysteriously but authentically with the nomadic fashion world. Helmut Lang can sell perfume that nobody can sample for the simple reason that what he\u2019s really selling is the Zeitgeist in a bottle. He\u2019s able to do this because his followers know that not only is this emperor wearing clothes, but damn fine ones at that. \u201cI met Helmut ten years ago,\u201d Kim Stringer recalls, \u201cand he told me then that you have to be really careful about what you put your name to. You have to believe in it. You can\u2019t just put a napkin out with your name on it, because your name\u2014your brand\u2014is all you have.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

Source URL: http:\/\/vogue.com\/article\/from-the-archives-scents-and-sensibility<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Magazine \u201cBeing Modern,\u201d According to Helmut Lang, \u201cIs About the Right Mix of Things.\u201d Read Vogue\u2019s May 2000 Profile of the Designer Here By Sally SingerPhotographer Annie Leibovitz December 7, 2025 SCENE BUT NOT HEARD Actress and scene-maker Chlo\u00eb Sevigny personifies the Arctic cool that\u2019s best worn with Lang\u2019s designs. Sheer top, and skirt, Helmut […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":957906,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[50],"class_list":["post-957905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-vogue-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=957905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/957905\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/957906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=957905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=957905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=957905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}