{"title":"HELMUT LANG（ヘルムート ラング）","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"90-s-old-helmut-lang-black-cotton-4-pockets-jacket-size-50","title":"[~90’s] Old HELMUT LANG Black Cotton 4 Pockets Jacket Size.50","description":"\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA HELMUT LANG black cotton four-pocket jacket, thought to date from around the 1990s.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis is the first time we have carried Helmut Lang in our online shop.\u003cbr\u003eIt is a piece that leaves me glad the first one should have been this.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHELMUT LANG is the label bearing the name of \"Helmut Lang\" himself, a designer born in Vienna, Austria, in 1956.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHe did not train at a fashion school.\u003cbr\u003eHe began making clothes self-taught, and everything started from the small atelier and boutique he opened in Vienna in 1979.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eHis debut on the Paris collections came in 1986.\u003cbr\u003eFrom there, across the whole of the 1990s, this man went on to rewrite the very vocabulary of fashion.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA slim silhouette stripped of ornament; the introduction of materials never before used in clothing, such as industrial tape and reflective trim; and that touch of his for dismantling the structures of uniform — military dress, workwear — and reassembling them as clothes for the city.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe sensibility we now take for granted, of clothing that is at once minimal and of the moment, was made by this man, and to say so is no exaggeration.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIn 1997 he moved his base from Paris to New York, and in 1999 the Prada Group took a stake in the house.\u003cbr\u003eThen in 2005 Lang himself left the label, and has since worked as a contemporary artist.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhich is to say that the period during which he held the reins is already closed.\u003cbr\u003eThere is no other label for which the phrase \"the designer's own era\" carries such urgent meaning.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNow, this particular piece retains a white woven label inside.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBeneath the \"HELMUT LANG\" logo runs a line reading \"PRODUCED IN 19◯◯\".\u003cbr\u003eThis practice of inscribing the year of manufacture into the garment itself is a detail emblematic of Lang in the latter half of the 1990s, and this piece can be read as having been made in 1998.\u003cbr\u003eA jacket made squarely in the middle of the designer's own era.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe design would seem to be underpinned by the American military's jungle fatigue.\u003cbr\u003eA four-pocket military shirt jacket made for the hot, humid theatre of Vietnam.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTwo at the chest, two at the waist.\u003cbr\u003eAll of them squared off rather than rounded, and gusseted, so that they swell into three dimensions once filled. The flaps button down, and are likewise left angular.\u003cbr\u003eA treatment that deliberately keeps some ruggedness in place.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLook to the front closure, however, and the impression turns completely.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eOnly a single button at the neck is left on show, everything below it made up as a fly placket.\u003cbr\u003eA fly placket conceals the fastenings behind the cloth, and by this means the front of the jacket rises as a single unbroken plane.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTo carry the function of a military garment over intact, and then to erase only the fastenings and grant it quietness.\u003cbr\u003eThis subtraction is, I think, precisely Lang's hand.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA horizontal seam runs across the sleeve just above the elbow, and the cuffs fasten with buttoned tabs.\u003cbr\u003eThe same buttoned tabs are fitted at either side of the hem, letting you adjust how it falls around the waist.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is made unlined, and seen from within, the finishing of the seam allowances is genuinely quiet work.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe cloth is a cotton sateen.\u003cbr\u003eA weave in which the yarn floats longer than in a twill; run a finger over it and there is not a single catch, the surface slipping cleanly away.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eGarment dyeing and a wash treatment have then been applied, so that colour has lifted to white along the lines where the cloth creased, producing the look of something worn for many years.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eCloth treated in this way goes on changing as it is actually worn.\u003cbr\u003eThe inside of the elbow, the mouths of the pockets, the turn-back of the hem.\u003cbr\u003eThe black lifts from the places where friction gathers, and in a few years' time a play of light and shadow entirely your own should emerge.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe colour is a black well advanced into fading.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNot a pure black but something like sumi ink with ash in it, appearing charcoal depending on how the light falls.\u003cbr\u003eThis ambiguity is really rather good: the weight and tension particular to black have gone out of it, leaving the relaxed bearing of a garment for everyday life.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt is precisely those who find black clothing difficult who I should like to see this colour.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThrown over a white shirt, with grey trousers below.\u003cbr\u003eThat alone makes a picture, and matching the layers beneath in black will settle the whole a degree further into quiet.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt holds the structure of the military, and yet worn, it looks nothing like military dress.\u003cbr\u003eThis curious balance is, I suspect, what will prove most useful of all in dressing day to day.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe size is marked \"50\".\u003cbr\u003eIn Japanese sizing this corresponds roughly to \"L\".\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is a degree of room through the body, while the length has been taken generously.\u003cbr\u003eA knit layered underneath will not, I think, make the shoulders feel confined.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThere is wear consistent with the cloth — burnishing at the edges, some fading — but no significant damage that would affect wearing it, so there is a great deal of life in it yet.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe label itself continues in New York to this day, but the clothes that Lang himself gave form to will not increase by so much as one.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eA man at the very centre of fashion, making clothes that never looked like fashion.\u003cbr\u003eThis is a piece by which that fact can be verified, and I should be glad if you would take the opportunity to have it in your hands.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"VIEUX ET NOUVEAU","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47928774164658,"sku":"J01085","price":54800.0,"currency_code":"JPY","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0554\/2140\/3314\/files\/J01085-1_5c26586e-1381-4e98-986c-af3c6574e0e9.jpg?v=1787323672"}],"url":"https:\/\/vieuxetnouveau-shop.com\/en\/collections\/helmut-lang.oembed","provider":"VIEUX ET NOUVEAU","version":"1.0","type":"link"}