SCENE BUT NOT HEARD Actress and scene-maker Chloë Sevigny personifies the Arctic cool that’s best worn with Lang’s designs. Sheer top, and skirt, Helmut Lang. Opposite: the elusive Austrian designer. Hair Didier Malige for Frédéric Fekkai Beauté; makeup, James Kaliardos. Fashion Editor: Grace Coddington.

“Scents & Sensibility,” by Sally Singers, was originally published in the May 2000 issue of Vogue.

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Backstage at the Helmut Lang fall 2000 show, a fashion situation—not to be confused with a fashion moment—has arisen. The world’s hottest clothes hanger, also known as Gisele Bündchen, has decided not to join Stephanie Seymour, Claudia Schiffer, Tatjana Patitz, Cecilia Chancellor, and the other beautiful somebodies assembled on Pier 94 of west Manhattan, on the runway. Helmut has granted the likable Brazilian only one exit i.e., catwalk outing—and she and her unkindness of handlers (does anyone flap more or squawk louder than a celebrity acolyte taking vicarious offense?) have taken umbrage and decided to exit in the conventional sense.

Helmut—who, according to Simon Doonan of Barneys, “casts his shows like a Fassbinder movie”—is unmoved. When Kate Moss was the hottest model in town, he made a point of using her only once per show, too. To wheel out the top girl more often would have seemed too much like going with the cheesy flow—and Helmut hates the cheesy flow. Which makes the following stunt all the more mysterious: Appearing on the show’s publicity sheet, along with the names of the parties responsible for hair, makeup, and music, are scent credits (for women, Helmut Lang Parfum; for men, Helmut Lang Eau de Cologne). How, observers wonder, could this icon of rigorous individualism have stooped to the industry’s most transparent commercial ploy plugging an aroma that nobody can actually sniff? Does the emperor have no nose?

This question becomes all the more pointed this month, as Helmut Lang launches the aforeplugged perfumes on, of all places, the Internet. It’s true that PCs have come a long way, but the scratch-’n’-sniff port has yet to be invented. So why sell scent that can’t be smelled? The answer, of course, is that the launch of Helmut Lang perfumes is, among other things, a launch about a launch. It pushes to a logical extreme the principle that consumption is driven by brand awareness—in this case, “Helmut Lang”—rather than by product awareness. As Richard Gluckman, the architect behind Lang’s stores and residences, observes, “The Internet launch is at one remove from the empirical experience.” In other words, you are invited to take leave of your senses, literally.

This isn’t the first time that Lang has tested the expectations of the public and the industry. He was the first designer to transplant a fashion house from Europe to America, in early 1998; once here, he became the first designer of note not to participate in the New York collections but, rather, to show his work on CD-ROMs and on the Net, thereby challenging the notoriously technophobic industry to get with it. Then, in summer 1998, he decided to stage his spring ’99 collection in advance of the European shows, a breathtakingly bold move that triggered a frenzy of rescheduling by other, far more established New York designers (Calvin Klein, et al) that left the sacrosanct fashion calendar looking as distressed as, well, a pair of Helmut Lang distressed jeans.

Ah, the jeans. Was there ever a cheekier act of fashion brinkmanship than charging designer prices for paint-spattered, dirt-colored denims? And yet, as ever, the industry stumbled gratefully in his wake. Lang’s friend Kim Stringer, fashion director of Japanese Vogue, says that on a Tokyo Sunday she must have seen 20 or 30 pairs of these faux-Pollock numbers walking around. “I actually just bought a pair myself,” she owns up apologetically. “What can I say? They’re the right length, right color, and the smudge of gold is in the right place. It’s really elegant.”

The emperor may have dirty clothes, but wherever he goes, fashion folk follow. Just try squeezing into Lang’s shoe box of a boutique in Milan during collections week. Drawn by the dollar-friendly prices and first dibs on the new season Helmut Lang clothing is made in Italy—a skulk of fashionistas makes for the Via Sant Andrea direct from Malpensa Airport and, fighting jet lag, melatonin withdrawal, and one another, shop. A seen-it-all editor in chief happily announces that a hot-pink T-shirt with extralong sleeves makes him “feel like an aristocrat”; a super-glamorous Prada-clad editor scoops two suits and a jacket and declares that they’re her “whole work wardrobe” for the season. Men and women who have access to every garment in the world are going crazy for sweatshirts and jeans and pale khaki suits. Only once they have slaked their thirst for Lang do they cross the street to Prada. Perhaps it was the spectacle of this stampede that finally prompted Patrizio Bertelli, head of Prada and husband of Miuccia, to buy a majority stake in Helmut Lang in 1999. For Miuccia Prada, Lang’s design sensibility is all about deceptive ease: “He has elegance, and when he is at his best a very specific detail gives an edge in a very simple way,” she says.

Fashion professionals love Lang’s clothes—“They’re my uniform in life,” swoons Cecilia Chancellor for their anonymous, worn-in, deliciously world-weary grace and functionality. “His clothes allow one’s personality to come through,” says Stephanie Seymour, “and yet are original and have a distinct style.” Narrow cashmere crombie coats come with dangling straps that double—make that triple—as belts and coat hooks and rucksack-type straps; straight-cut trousers sit low on the waist and are narrow and lengthening and never, ever cling to one’s imperfect posterior; parkas with shearling hoods seem both sporty and angelic; and organza pouf dresses, in deep emeralds and amethysts, are conventionally pretty yet intensely modern. The artist Jenny Holzer—Helmut Lang also holds great appeal in the art world—describes his look as “functional, effective, minimalist, and nicely stripped down. His suits have all the essential elements, and then there’s something better, or worse, about them than there would be otherwise.” In short, Helmut Lang makes knowing clothing for those in the know. “Everything about him is secretive and for the cognoscenti,” says Doonan. The woman on the street may admire an attractively worn-out pair of leather motorcycle trousers, but she’d never guess their maker’s name.

“It’s the opposite of logomania,” explains Lang. “We stand for something very different and modern, but traditional and well made, as well—something that just feels right. Our clients rely on us; they know that when we put something out it’s been thought about carefully.” Lang is a handsome, long-haired man in his 40s who works in a black-and-white office staffed by attractive young people wearing the black trousers and white shirt favored by their boss. The effect is not one of fabulousness but of the grooviest gathering of architects one could imagine. What’s under construction is the immaterial cathedral that is the Helmut Lang brand, and the current spire climbing into the sky is the new line of perfumes.

Lang was first alerted to “how much we are surrounded by smells, and how important scents are to all cultures” at the Florence Fashion and Art Biennale three years ago, when he created an aroma redolent of sweat, starch, and skin to accompany Jenny Holzer’s intimate narrative of love gone bad. From this malodorous collaboration sprang a heartfelt interest in the possibilities of fragrance and a partnership with Procter & Gamble. The results are surprising. His friend and perfume guinea pig, the photographer Elfie Semotan, says that “people react very strongly” to the new perfume, that they “think it’s stimulating, interesting, erotic.” To smell of Helmut Lang is, for a woman, to wear a scent that is old-fashioned, vaguely Parisian, and—as Lang says—“quite voluptuous. It’s a scent that is not on the market at the moment.” Indeed, Helmut Lang Parfum has nothing of the grapefruitiness or grassiness of most of its competitors. Helmut Lang Eau de Cologne (pour homme), which is proudly worn by its eponym, also “doesn’t exist at the moment” and sits “on the borderline of aftershave.” Lang sees these scents as “the beginning of a perfume tradition”; he will, in the coming months, open a Gluckman-designed perfumery in SoHo to sell his wares in a non-cyber surrounding. A department-store boutique will follow, but the traditional retail market will remain quite selective: “It is not a mainstream commercial product,” Lang says. “I think it should develop slowly in the way that old perfumes did.” He is particularly proud of the packaging—a heavy molded-glass bottle with a European weightiness that is oddly contemporary. “Being modern,” Helmut Lang theorizes, “is about the right mix of things—certain elements have to be traditional, certain things have to be new. It does not mean having no roots at all.”

Lang’s own roots are famously unpropitious. He was brought up by his grandparents in a remote Alpine village (think Heidi, edelweiss, yodeling), studied business in Vienna, and took up design with no real training. By the mid-eighties, he was showing in Paris and injecting Austrian ich weiss nicht was—lederhosen, horn buttons, wedding lodens—into silhouettes that were severe, minimalist, and at the time avant-garde in their minimalism. Linda Dresner, the Park Avenue and Birmingham, Michigan, boutique owner, remembers Lang’s debut collection in 1986 for its “oversize cotton shirts and some sort of lederhosen. There was some quaint twist that attracted me to the clothes.” Christian Lacroix recalls “very elegant, very couture clothes. A sharp geometry was already at work, very neat and abstract.” Jenny Capitain, the German fashion editor who helped Lang with his first Parisian shows, says, “In the beginning, he had two Viennese pattern-makers and Austrian fabrics. The quality was amazing.”

SCARLET WOMAN “Well dressed and well groomed is the attitude of the time,” says the designer. (And fantastically sexy, one might add.) Red turtleneck, skirt, Helmut Lang. Hair, Sally Hershberger for Sheer Blonde; makeup, Denise Markey for Club Monaco Cosmetics. Fashion Editor: Elissa Santisi.

The Tyrolean dimension faded out after a few seasons; these days, Austria is represented in Lang’s work by old pals from Vienna who continue to model his sleek, sexy suits even though they have jobs as physicians and attorneys. But the quality of the clothing, and the cleverness of its fusion of the classic and the antic, is undiminished. Consider, for example, Lang’s take on the current lust for all things ostentatious. Whereas other designers are offering precious furs and lots of gold accessories for next fall, Lang gives us ragged, wild shearlings in a golden-honey color that leave the pack far behind in terms of modern luxury and glamour. He makes a cocktail dress in pale carnation-pink organza that trails four strips of cloth like party streamers, and it looks grand, not girlie. He places a feather on a high heel, and it looks bold, not fragile. “Last season, things were already starting to be very polished,” Lang says. “Part of the attitude of the time is that you have the opportunity to be very well dressed and well groomed. After the whole sportswear thing, it just feels very right again.” His feel for what’s very right is inspired and inspiring: Lang has always been an influential countercurrent in the mainstream of style. In the eighties he introduced a vocabulary of dressing—downbeat tailored suiting, ingenious low-key layering (of sheer tanks, tees, and dresses), technofabrics for everyday (and easy evenings)—that came to define the nineties. And if you want to trace the roots of this year’s “lady” look, just recall his knee-length silk-feather coat with matching skirt in blush pink from spring ’98. “I think he’s a great stylist,” says the designer Kostas Murkudis, who assisted Lang from 1985 to 1992. “When you see the motorcycle stuff or the NASA things”— space suits for fall ’99—“you know he’s picked up on the right clothes at the right time and given them a new spin.”

This talent for spin manifests itself in Lang’s marketing strategy, which, even after the sale to Prada, is entirely his own and follows his counterintuitive sense of what’s appropriate for his brand. This usually means not doing anything so obvious as showing the product as such. When he wanted to launch “a denim line with edge,” his ad campaign was restricted to Robert Mapplethorpe photographs that bore no trace of his jeans. His taxi ads proclaimed HELMUT LANG with a postage-stamp mug shot or two of his Austrian model friends. (The new taxi campaign—to be run on a thousand cabs—dispenses entirely with pictures.) For his accessories line, he places a photograph of a messy pile of his feathery bags—think fox in a chicken coop—in, provocatively enough, National Geographic (“the printed equivalent of the Internet. All different kinds of people read it, plus nobody throws it out”). Lang is not actually trying to reach the masses, however. He’s doing what tickles his fancy—and, in his overt populism and egalitarianism, doing that cool thing that involves avoiding the recognizably cool. It’s a terrifyingly confident strategy that reveals an implacable self-belief. “When it’s a strong brand name,” he says, explaining the Internet launch of his perfumes, “you buy it and you try it.”

Lang’s certainty about the value of his name has allowed him to forsake his corporate independence without losing peace of mind. Even after Prada’s disastrous falling out with Jil Sander, Lang is unfazed about being in partnership with the Italian megacorporation. “After I moved to New York, I had to make the decision to go to the next important level,” he says. “I always wanted a partner to take care of the business side—my soul was not attached to it. Merging with Prada was an acknowledgment that they know how to do it and on which level of quality it has to be performed.” With Patrizio Bertelli’s know-how and capital, new Helmut Lang boutiques are now on Gluckman’s drawing boards for London, Los Angeles, Paris, and various cities in the Far East; and the Milan store will soon move to a more capacious location. In addition to the perfumerie, Lang plans to open a small made-to-measure salon in SoHo from which he will design one-off looks and customize ready-to-wear pieces for a perfect fit. This venture—the opposite of his impersonal Internet exploits—promises to be an ideal outlet for his talent for modern tailoring: “It has nothing to do with couture,” Lang says, “which to me is old-fashioned. Luxury has been defined differently in every decade. It’s time to define it anew.”

Housewares also lie in the future— “something very strong and very high quality; it’s still good to have handwoven linen”—but for now the real benefit of the Prada sale is the breathing space it affords the designer. “The last four or five years were really crazy,” Lang says. “Now I concentrate on the artistic stuff, and that gives me enough room for life.” In his mind, creativity and a low-key existence go hand in hand: “You have to know what’s going on in life to create fashion. You have to have a normal life.”

Normal life, these days, involves a loft in downtown New York and a $15 million property in East Hampton that he snatched from under the nose of Jerry Seinfeld. You won’t see photo spreads of these places in any magazine, because Helmut Lang likes to keep his private life private: “I’m not from this old school of designers. Basically, if you allow everything, you’re always on a promoting tour.” Lang prefers the company of a loyal and long-standing set of friends with whom he can eat McDonald’s Quarter Pounders—“maybe three times a week,” according to his Viennese internist-friend and model Wolfgang Ruisz—and tour the Chelsea flea markets in search of old books about painting and botany. It seems that after his peripatetic European years, when he divided his time between Vienna and Paris, Lang has settled down. Certainly, the appeal of Austria hasn’t been increased by the country’s recent turn to the far, far right. “What is there to say?” he mutters despairingly when the subject of Jorg Haider is raised.

However much his day-to-day life is now rooted in the U.S., Helmut Lang’s sense and sensibility will never be deracinated from Mitteleuropa. “He has the Austrian habit of being very cautious about everything,” says Ruisz. “He wants everything about his clothes to work.” More mystically, it is perhaps Lang’s inherited sense of Central European melancholy and anonymity—think Kafka, think Musil—that enables him to evolve, with a matchless prescience, a brand without borders that resonates so mysteriously but authentically with the nomadic fashion world. Helmut Lang can sell perfume that nobody can sample for the simple reason that what he’s really selling is the Zeitgeist in a bottle. He’s able to do this because his followers know that not only is this emperor wearing clothes, but damn fine ones at that. “I met Helmut ten years ago,” Kim Stringer recalls, “and he told me then that you have to be really careful about what you put your name to. You have to believe in it. You can’t just put a napkin out with your name on it, because your name—your brand—is all you have.”