Editor’s Note: The much-maligned helmet is the subject of a Lange New exhibition At Mack in Vienna. As part of Vogue Runway’s ongoing efforts to document the history of fashion shows, we’re kicking off the year by adding fully digitized shows to the site. This fall 1997 ready-to-wear collection was presented on March 13, 1997 in Paris.
With Alexander McQueen and John Galliano at Givenchy and Christian Dior, respectively, backstory, references, and biography were becoming increasingly important in Paris fashion in 1997. Always an outlier, Helmut Lang’s stories were largely about making clothes, fabric selection and manipulation, but his shows were not without fragrance.
Kristen Owen opened it up in a nubby ivory car coat, styled like this Vogue Named one of the most sought-after items of the season. As compelling as the tailored piece was, what she wore underneath, a white jersey top that gathered in loose folds at the waist, was even more so. An accessory lifted from men’s formalwear, cummerbunds were translated for everyday use, as was the tighter harness, a “mid-layer garment” that Virgil Abloh would adopt two decades later.
Protection and wrapping are overlapped here. Bands that extend around the waist and one arm may refer to a form of soft servitude or, alternatively, a sartorial embrace. At its most extreme, Lang’s wraps had a mummifying quality about them, but for the most part, the designer’s use of elastic and draping existed in a zone between Japanese furoshiki and Christo, only here the covering was neither an object nor a monument but the human body. Using elastic made for slippage, the imperfect fit had a slight awkwardness that felt particularly human. Tenders, too, were pieces of floating tulle that caught the air as the model moved and which a contemporary reviewer dubbed “angel’s wings”. These appendages were perhaps best framed by soft duvet pieces – in particular, the one that Stella Tennant hung from her shoulders.
