Today on The Art Bystander, I speak with Marlies Wirth, Curator for Digital Culture and Head of the Design Collection at the MAK in Vienna, about one of the most quietly radical figures of late-20th- and early-21st-century culture: Helmut Lang. Our conversation turns not to his later sculptural practice, but to the architecture of a legacy that reshaped how we understand design, communication, identity, and the very idea of what a fashion house could be.
The MAK’s new exhibition, Excerpts from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive — running 10.12.2025 → 03.05.2026 — reflects on the years 1986–2005, a period in which Lang’s vision dissolved the boundaries between disciplines. His work unfolded across clothing, graphics, architecture, staging, branding, and digital experimentation — not as separate gestures, but as parts of a single cultural language. Long before he stepped away from fashion, Lang had already begun to operate like an artist moving across mediums, using every surface as a site of meaning.
This retrospective reveals how deeply his ideas anticipated the world we now take for granted. It recalls the moment he livestreamed a runway before the internet had become a stage; the years when he turned New York itself into an extension of his voice; the way his presentations and stores became environments rather than commercial spaces. Lang’s legacy is not simply a story of minimalism or aesthetic restraint — it is a study in how form can become communication, and how identity can be constructed with both precision and quiet intensity.
In speaking with Marlies, the past becomes newly vivid: not nostalgic, but architectural. We explore how Lang’s decisions — from the shape of a jacket to the rhythm of a campaign, to the destruction of his own archive — can be understood as part of a larger narrative about authorship, memory, and the courage to redefine oneself.
This episode looks back at the cultural landscape Helmut Lang helped build, and the echoes of his vision that continue to structure how we see and experience the world today.
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