Display & Exhibit - Case Study Helmut Lang

Abstract

From 1986 to 2005, Peter Scepka, born in Vienna in 1956, was running his fashion house under the name of Helmut Lang, initially from Paris and since 1998 based in New York. Not least through numerous collaborations with contemporary and pop-culturally relevant artistic positions such as Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois and Jürgen Teller, Helmut Lang succeeded in becoming one of the most influential pioneers not only of fashion, but of the entire visual language of the turn of the millennium. His style, which Jenny Holzer laconically described as “a bit mean and less is more”, formed a stark contrast to the opulence that dominated the 80s and laid the foundations for the anti-fashion of the following decades. The label‘s proximity to the visual arts ultimately meant that in 2005 Helmut Lang left his own label, which had by then achieved an undeniable cult status, to pursue his own artistic practice as a sculptor. The design studio ‚Display & Exhibit – Case study Helmut Lang’ is based on the assumption that there is a close relationship between all applied and visual arts, and that an engagement with various disciplines outside of architecture broadens the horizon of one‘s own practice. The inherent fast pace of fashion implies a questionable relationship to pressing ecological issues on the one hand, on the other it requires a creative flexibility and spontaneity that are in contrast to the precise and sometimes stagnant carefulness with which architectural designs are developed. The aim of the studio is to critically question these discrepancies and to extract a synergetic approach to enrich the participants’ position as architects.