Editor’s note: The much-missed Helmut Lang is the subject of a new exhibition at MAK in Vienna. As part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to document the history of fashion shows, we are kicking off the year by adding as complete-as-possible digitized shows to the site. This fall 1997 ready-to-wear collection was presented in Paris on March 13, 1997.
With Alexander McQueen and John Galliano installed at Givenchy and Christian Dior, respectively, backstory, references, and biography were becoming increasingly important in Paris fashion in 1997. Always an outlier, Helmut Lang spun stories that were largely about clothes making, fabric selection, and manipulation, but his shows were not without the fragrance of suggested scenarios.
Kirsten Owen opened this one in a nubby ivory car coat, a style that Vogue named a most-wanted item of the season. As compelling as that tailored piece was, what she wore under it, a white jersey top that gathered into loose folds at the waist, was even more so. Cummerbunds, an accessory lifted from men’s formalwear, were translated for day-to-day use, as were more strident harnesses, a “mid-layer garment” that Virgil Abloh would adopt two decades later.
Protection and wrapping overlapped here. Bands that extended around the waist and one arm could be referencing a kind of soft bondage or, alternatively, a sartorial embrace. At its most extreme, Lang’s wrapping had a mummifying quality about it, but for the most part, the designer’s use of elastic and draping seemed to exist in a zone between Japanese furoshiki and Christo, only here the covering was neither an object nor a monument but the human body. The use of elastic made for slippery, imperfect fits that had a gentle awkwardness that felt particularly human. Tender, too, were the bits of floating tulle that caught the air as models walked and which one contemporary reviewer dubbed “angel wings.” Those appendages were perhaps best conjured by the soft duvet pieces—in particular, the one that Stella Tennant wore hanging from her shoulders.
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