With »Helmut Lang. Séance de Travail 1986–2005 / Excerpts from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive« the MAK – Museum für angewandte Kunst Vienna presents one of the most comprehensive examinations of the work of Austrian designer Helmut Lang. On view from 10 December 2025 to 3 May 2026, the exhibition goes far beyond a conventional fashion show: it focuses on Lang’s conceptual strategies, his interdisciplinary working method, and his role as a visionary between fashion, design, and art.
Curator Marlies Wirth (MAK – Design Collection), together with Lilli Hollein (General Director of the MAK), has developed an exhibition concept that breaks open the category of »fashion« and instead understands Lang’s work as a processual design of identity, strategy, and visual language. The title »Séance de Travail«—»working session«—is not only a historical reference to Lang’s own show formats of the 1990s, but also a programmatic statement: a laboratory in which production, advertising, brand development, spatial design, and audience experience are conceived as interconnected fields of design.
A central element of the exhibition is the MAK Helmut Lang Archive, which Lang donated to the museum in 2011 and which is today regarded as the largest and only public archive of its kind worldwide. It comprises more than 10,000 records, including not only selected garments but also prototypes, lookbooks, advertising campaigns, photographs, Polaroids, production samples, backstage materials, and internal documents. This breadth makes visible how Lang understood fashion not as an isolated product, but as an interdisciplinary design process in which cut, material, communication, space, and brand were always part of a coherent system.
In keeping with this approach, the exhibition deliberately forgoes a chronologically ordered retrospective. Instead, the material is organized according to thematic fields that render Lang’s working method legible as a constructive, analytical, and experimental practice. Particular emphasis is placed on mixed-media installations and site-specific presentations: sculptural displays, reconstructions of shop architectures, and visualization surfaces create a spatial experience that makes Helmut Lang’s overarching conception of design—ranging from fashion collections and retail architecture to brand communication—tangible.
Helmut Lang (*1956 in Vienna), who worked internationally from 1986 and became one of the most important representatives of minimalist, analytical design in the late 1990s, withdrew from the fashion industry in 2005 to devote himself entirely to the visual arts. This shift is also considered within the exhibition: Lang’s current artistic practice, which draws on the thinking of his earlier work, presents him as a designer who understands and continues to shape form, material, and identity across disciplinary boundaries.
His collections are based on reduction, functional clarity, and a conscious engagement with material and the body, with clothing always understood as part of a broader design context. All of this also informs the presentation at the MAK, where fashion appears as an applied design practice between design, communication, and cultural analysis, underscoring the enduring relevance of Lang’s work.
»Helmut Lang. Séance de Travail 1986–2005 / Excerpts from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive« makes visible how a designer continuously redefines his own categories of design and how his working method continues to resonate in fashion, communication, and art to this day: fashion is not reduced to form and surface, but understood as a cultural asset. [Ed.]
