The enduring coolness of Helmut Lang And it doesn't have anything to do with minimalism

The first word that comes to mind when it comes to Helmut Lang is "minimalism." And in fact, in his 90s collections there is still, decades later, a simplicity that didn't fit with the somewhat boisterous opulence of many of his contemporaries. But, you might argue, in the 90s everyone was minimalist: to name a few, Jil Sander, Calvin Klein, Martin Margiela, Ann Demeulemeester. Even the Gucci and Prada collections of those years were dominated by the sensual and simplified dress – a response to the overdose of the opulence of the 80s. According to Olivier Saillard, who cites the designer in his essay The Empire of Signs, Lang should be called more of an essentialist than a minimalist: that is, an artist not interested in quantitatively eliminating the superfluous but in bringing out qualitatively the pure essence of things, from Less is More to Less is Better.

The story of Helmut Lang's end of his career as a designer is marked, as in many stories, by the interference of external investors, namely the Prada Group that bought the brand and wanted to follow an unnatural commercial strategy for it, more oriented to the sale of accessories than to that of jeans for which it had become famous. Things went wrong and Lang left fashion forever in 2005 with the brand going from hand to hand while continuing to present new collections reinterpreting Lang's archive, which was destroyed in 2010 partly due to a fire, partly because of Lang himself who chopped every piece left to turn it into one of his works of art. Lang's own iconoclastic gesture demonstrates his completely abstract approach to a pre-conception vision of fashion and its value. Last year the designer told Vogue:

My intention was always to become an artist. I started experimenting to find my language and became sidetracked. I had the self-inflicted idea that I could do clothes as a second day job to sustain myself until my artwork would do so. As you know, it grew into much more than I expected. Fashion was always supposed to be temporary. 

This devil-may-care attitude is the key to Helmut Lang's charm, which is the charm of intelligent sincerity and concrete creativity without filters. In an age of easy façade idealism, political and ideological connotations and emphatic press releases describing fashion with a curial lexicon, which does not belong to it and seems almost to strive to ignore the commercial nature of the business, exalting an alleged art at the expense of authentic craftsmanship, Helmut Lang's career is still a lesson in sincerity today, of that elusive realness that fashion has lost by romanticizing itself for the paying public. As for romance, Lang said, in the same Vogue interview: "I abstracted it as intelligently as I could to make it not appear too obvious. Romance is more important as an inner quality than one you wear on your sleeve".