Elfie Semotan was 51 when she first walked in a fashion show in the early ’90s for the modernist designer Helmut Lang. “August, my younger son, who was 10 years old then, came to see me during the preparations for the show and asked me, quite worried, if I knew that I was by far the oldest of all the girls walking the runway,” she told Vogue’s Sarah Mower in 2016. “I was 51, and I knew! I also knew that I could rely on Helmut to judge if it was good or not to have me on the runway.”
For Lang, Semotan’s age was no doubt a benefit, as was the fact that she was not a model, but a photographer who hailed from Austria, as he did. In the era of the impossibly flawless, over-the-top glamazons, Lang went with mannequins who were stripped-back, elegant, and very real. They were often non-models or friends of the designer, as Semotan was. “Helmut had special ties with a lot of the models and almost everyone who worked for him backstage,” she told Mower. “When he had relationships, he was very attentive and thoughtful, and all that was mirrored in how the shows were organized.” Together they helped conjure the taut, intellectual glamour for which he was known and which led Simon Doonan, once the creative director of Barneys New York, to remark that Lang “casts his shows like a Fassbinder movie.”
“The way Helmut simplified hair and makeup didn’t make him look simple, but really avant-garde, always the freshest and the most modern in the best sense,” Semotan recalled of Lang’s casting decisions. “The models knew that, they loved it, and knew they were chosen not only for their looks, but also for their personalities. The first time I walked for him, I was excited and nervous at the same time.”
Semotan died yesterday at the age of 84, in her native Austria. She leaves behind a legacy as an accomplished photographer who specialized in portraiture, landscapes, and still lifes. Over the years, she captured fine artists like Louise Bourgeois and Christopher Wool, contributed to magazines including this one, The New Yorker, Interview, i-D, and many others, released various books of her work, and was the subject of a documentary in 2019 titled Elfie Semotan, Photographer.
After that runway debut, Smotan was an intermittent presence in Lang’s shows. In memory of her passing, we’ve collected some of her appearances on the designer’s catwalks.
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