A name resonant with vision and distinction: the MAK draws on its Helmut Lang archives for a comprehensive exhibition around the creativity and influence of this designer and artist.
- Insights into his innovations
- Covers fields like fashion (!), interior design, advertising, and more
- Runs Dec 10, 2025 – May 3, 2026
- Book MAK museum tickets*
- See also:
Séance de travail 1986-2005
((Helmut Lang was the first luxury brand to use New York’s taxi tops for ad purposes; New York City Taxi Top, advertising, 1998–2004; MAK Helmut Lang Archive, LNI 649; photo: MAK/Christian Mendez)
Former fashion designer and label founder (and now artist), Helmut Lang is one of those names whose influence defies easy description.
Some people ride the waves of art and design, while others (like Lang) make those waves themselves.
When words like pioneering, revolutionary, visionary, and distinctive collide, you’re left with a maelstrom of creativity whose whirlpools and eddies shift the surrounding cultural landscape.
An exhibition at the MAK museum presents Lang’s continuing impact on fashion & design aesthetics and the wider socioculture, with a focus on the years 1986 (which saw his first runway collection) to 2005 (when he retired from fashion).
(Helmut Lang, video still, Helmut Lang Collection Hommes Femmes Séance de Travail Défilé # Hiver 94/95 (1994). Depicted person: Kirsten Owen. MAK Helmut Lang Archive. Courtesy of hl-art)
The Séance de Travail exhibition dips into the museum’s unique Helmut Lang archive to offer insight into, for example, his approaches, processes, and spheres of influence.
We discover that those spheres of influence extend far beyond fashion design into advertising, store architecture, and other realms.
Artists Louise Bourgeois and Jenny Holzer, for example, created location-specific installations for Lang’s flagship stores.
Largely ignorant of all things fashion, I can only offer up my personal observations from a wander around the exhibition galleries…
One of Lang’s innovations in fashion was to change the traditional runway show into a more authentic and raw experience. Show notes, clothes, photos and other documents (including budget lists) allow us an intriguing glimpse of the paddling beneath the water of the show swan.
(MAK Exhibition View, 2025 / Chapter Séance de Travail; HELMUT LANG. SÉANCE DE TRAVAIL 1986–2005 / Excerpts from the MAK Helmut Lang Archive; MAK Exhibition Hall; press photo © kunst-dokumentation.com/MAK)
One huge gallery even reproduces the floor plan of the kind of show shown in videos elsewhere in the exhibition.
I’d recommend doing what I did: stride confidently along the paths taken by models to get a smidgen of an idea for what it must feel like. Particularly as you pass seats marked with such names as Anna Wintour, Vogue, Le Figaro, New York Times, Elle, Harper & Queens, GQ, and Vanity Fair.
Back to those videos. If we ignore the clothes for a moment, the audience feels like a paradox of transience and intransience. Their enthusiasm, curiosity or affected coolness seem a constant at such events, yet the faces would inevitably change through the decades.
The exhibition certainly gives you a feel for Lang as designer, disruptor, innovator, brand manager, collaborator, artist, copywriter and communicator. Most of us struggle to succeed at just one of those.
So a doff of the (well-designed) hat to Mr Lang. And to the MAK for bringing us the exhibition.
Dates, tickets & tips
Dive into the world of Helmut Lang from December 10th, 2025 to May 3rd, 2026. An entrance ticket for or from the MAK includes Séance de Travail, which takes place in the main ground floor exhibition space.
(Booking service provided by Tiqets.com*, who I am an affiliate of)
How to get there
See my main MAK page for travel tips, but the museum sits close to the Stubentor station on both the U3 subway line and tram line 2 that seems to go just about everywhere in Vienna.
Address: Stubenring 5, 1010 Vienna