Archives are generally presented in ways that respect and protect their original forms: libraries are filled with leather-bound tomes, museum exhibitions display garments in plexiglass cases, and so on.
But for Helmut Lang, the Austrian-born artist, the archival method is anything but conventional. Over the course of his boundary-pushing career as a fashion designer (he was one of the first to introduce PVC into his creations), his archives eventually amounted to 6,000 garments (after he donated a large volume of his work to leading fashion, design, and contemporary art collections worldwide), tracing the history and evolution of the Helmut Lang brand.
But last year, a fire broke out in Lang’s New York studio, almost ruining much of his remaining archive. Ever the creative thinker, the designer toyed with the idea of deconstruction, and it seemed, if his archives were to be forever lost, he might as well be the architect of their demise.
The result is “Make It Hard,” Lang’s solo exhibition that will run from July 22 – August 8 at The Fireplace Project in East Hampton. Curated by Neville Wakefield, the exhibition presents thousands of Lang’s designs from the past 25 years, shredded and molded into a series of 16 floor-to-ceiling tubular structures.
“The materials and fabrics he used to give temporary definition to the body are now just traces of natural and synthetic fibers, plastics, metals, leathers, fur, skins, feathers and hair,” states Wakefield, “erasing the past and the difference they once stood for.”
To those who have followed his work, it’s no surprise that Lang’s archive would come to take on such a radical form. For him, the relationship between art and fashion design has been a symbiotic one, as he infused his silhouettes with references to the artistic traditions of Vienna, reinterpreted classical notions of tailoring, and worked with innovative fabrics and textures to help create his now iconic men’s and women’s collections.
And just as Lang has always blurred the lines between fashion and fine art, this exhibition resonates with the design philosophy that has guided him all along: at the end of the day, fashion and art begin and end as one.
- Yale Breslin