Editor’s observe: The much-missed Helmut Lang is the topic of a new exhibition at MAK in Vienna. As a part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to doc the historical past of trend exhibits, we’re kicking off the yr by including as complete-as-possible digitized exhibits to the location. This fall 1997 ready-to-wear assortment was offered in Paris on March 13, 1997.
With Alexander McQueen and John Galliano put in at Givenchy and Christian Dior, respectively, backstory, references, and biography have been changing into more and more vital in Paris trend in 1997. All the time an outlier, Helmut Lang spun tales that have been largely about garments making, cloth choice, and manipulation, however his exhibits weren’t with out the perfume of recommended eventualities.
Kirsten Owen opened this one in a nubby ivory automobile coat, a method that Vogue named a most-wanted merchandise of the season. As compelling as that tailor-made piece was, what she wore underneath it, a white jersey prime that gathered into unfastened folds on the waist, was much more so. Cummerbunds, an adjunct lifted from males’s formalwear, have been translated for day-to-day use, as have been extra strident harnesses, a “mid-layer garment” that Virgil Abloh would undertake twenty years later.
Safety and wrapping overlapped right here. Bands that prolonged across the waist and one arm might be referencing a type of mushy bondage or, alternatively, a sartorial embrace. At its most excessive, Lang’s wrapping had a mummifying high quality about it, however for probably the most half, the designer’s use of elastic and draping appeared to exist in a zone between Japanese furoshiki and Christo, solely right here the protecting was neither an object nor a monument however the human physique. Using elastic made for slippery, imperfect suits that had a mild awkwardness that felt significantly human. Tender, too, have been the bits of floating tulle that caught the air as fashions walked and which one up to date reviewer dubbed “angel wings.” These appendages have been maybe finest conjured by the mushy cover items—specifically, the one which Stella Tennant wore hanging from her shoulders.