Helmut Lang. SÉANCE DE TRAVAIL 1986–2005
MAK Museum, Wien
From December 10, 2025 until May 3, 2026
The exhibition SÉANCE DE TRAVAIL 1986–2005 invites visitors into the universe of Helmut Lang, where every garment, installation and image reveals a radical approach to fashion and identity. The goal is clear: to reconstruct Lang’s creative process and his interdisciplinary vision. Some designers make noise—then there’s Helmut Lang, a designer who replaced noise with an echo that is hard to forget. Entering SÉANCE DE TRAVAIL 1986–2005 at Vienna’s MAK is to step into that dense silence that defined his work: a full pause, a disruption that resets the way we look at things. This is not a retrospective. Rather, it is a still-warm laboratory, a room where thought has not been scrubbed clean of its original chaos. For the first time on such a scale, the Helmut Lang Archive—the only public archive dedicated to the designer—is opened to the public. This monumental collection of over 10,000 objects chronicles his work from 1986 to 2005. From it emerges the traces of a language: lean, sharp, precise, yet profoundly human.
Lang has always navigated the creative language of fashion by designing identities, just as one designs spaces: with relentless discipline and an almost emotional intuition—this is his signature. SÉANCE DE TRAVAIL embodies precisely this principle: identity as architecture. The site-specific installations reconstruct elements of his iconic New York and Paris stores, transforming them into sculptures that both contain and release garments, images, and sounds. Everything is alive; nothing is a static mannequin. Visitors move through an ecosystem that merges design, communication, architecture, scents, video and fragments of backstage life. There is no hierarchy. “All has equal weight” Lang said—and here, you feel it: a sketch carries the same weight as a campaign, a taxi-top ad the same dignity as an evening gown.
The famous Séance de Travail, the “work sessions” that replaced traditional runway shows, take center stage once again. For the first time, the full-length videos are presented at life-size. This is not mere nostalgia; it is a reminder of Lang’s visionary spirit. No raised runways. No self-congratulatory theater. Only people in motion: models, friends, strangers, bodies of all kinds, all ages, moving through industrial spaces that became narratives themselves.
“The MAK archive is meant to be a ‘living archive’ I hope it inspires others to have the courage to find their own voice. The past is never easier than the present; the present is always the opportunity.”
Over the course of a career worthy of celebration, Lang collaborated with artists long before it became a common branding strategy. Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois, Richard Gluckman—these were genuine, profound exchanges, almost confessional. The exhibition demonstrates this through materials that break down disciplinary and curatorial boundaries: LEDs, sculptures, concept fragrances, raw images, texts that pulse like veins. What we today call “interdisciplinarity” was then a form of resistance. Scent—considered by Lang an invisible extension of identity—becomes a key element of his language: an evocative presence capable of activating memory and insinuating itself into space like a work of art. His fragrances, often developed in dialogue with other artists, were conceived as atmospheres, as emotional imprints that completed his aesthetic vision.
Looking at all these fragments—analog lookbooks, Polaroids stained with life, prototypes, low-resolution videos, hybrid objects—a striking coherence and aesthetic emerges. In every creative act, Lang displayed unwavering consistency and integrity, qualities that over the years not only preserved his creative world but made it increasingly resilient and a source of inspiration for multiple generations.
He anticipated the livestreamed fashion show back in 1998.
He reshaped the fashion calendar—without intending to.
He transformed New York into a luminous manifesto of taxis and Mapplethorpe photographs.
He gave a new identity to those who thought they didn’t need one.
At the MAK, Lang’s memory is not simply displayed—it is set in motion. The archive is alive, as the designer himself says: a place created to generate new ideas, an archive that breathes. Perhaps this is his most radical legacy: turning an inheritance into an engine for the future. This exhibition does not celebrate the past—it celebrates a way of looking at the present with rigor, freedom, and the fierce vulnerability that belongs only to true innovators.
For further information Mak.at.
