With a new age of Helmut Lang to be ushered in by Isabella Burley this forthcoming season, the self-taught Austrian designer’s refined minimalism is set for a renaissance. Hood By Air’s Shayne Oliver will design a collection under the Helmut Lang imprint to be shown at New York Fashion Week that will draw from Lang’s comprehensive history of stark minimalism, signature combination of high fashion with everyday items and his penchant for bondage.

Here, we revisit the legacy of one of fashion’s most enduring names.

Minimalism

Helmut Lang’s sharp, sparse designs lead the way for the most enduring fashion movement on this century so far – minimalism. Lang’s less-is-more approach subverted traditional notions of glamour, supplanted ostentatious adornments and gaud for a sleek, androgynous image. Onto this silhouette, Lang sparingly attached details that elevated his collections beyond the ordinary. References to bondage, motorcycling and art added additional layers of sophistication and subversion, recognizable to only those in the know.

In the twelve years since Lang departed his own brand to further his career as a fine artist, minimalism has remained a mainstay of high fashion. From Raf Simons, to Céline, to Kanye West, to Supreme, the most successful and revered designers and labels of the past decade taken influence from the Austrian.

High and Low fashion

In recent years, the already blurred lines between the high street and the runway have been obliterated. Everyday items – from workwear to shot bags to bicycles to carrier bags – take their turn to become statements of the season. Demna Gvasalia of Vetements and Balenciaga has extrapolated this to the extreme by lifting corporate and political logos, casting actual families and causing a tidal wave of normcore throughout the fashion world. He owes more than a little to Helmut Lang, who brought the bomber jacket, worker’s paint-spattered jeans, and even police uniforms to the runway, adding flashes of technical experimentation or off-kilter adornments to take the everyday to the avantgarde.

Bondage

BDSM has come a long way in the last ten years. Once an entirely hidden subculture, obfuscated by ignorance and sexual conservatism, it once seemed highly unlikely to be referenced by high-end fashion houses with a sensitive clientele to maintain. Step forward, Helmut Lang, though, who insisted on attaching straps, harnesses and belts to jackets and trousers or simply presenting them as they are as accessories. Lang had built upon the work Vivienne Westwood and Jean-Paul Gaultier, who introduced bondage as a fashionable concept, but went one step further by making it accessible.

Brands including Hood by Air and Gareth Pugh have since frequently incorporated bondage elements into their designs, wth fully fledged fetishwear brands including latex expert Atsuko Kudo and Fleet Ilya flirting with entering the mainstream and subtler bondage references making it as far as the high street.