power and egalitarianism
Helmut Lang Exhibition, Vienna
a trip to the helmut lang exhibition
Leadership Doesn’t Need More Performance. It Needs Better Design.
As a small peer group who act as guardians of Oasis, ever year or so we take time away in places we have never visited before to discover, explore possibility and notice what impacts.
Our trip to Vienna took us to MAK and the Lang exhibition.
Helmut Lang didn’t believe in spectacle. While fashion rewarded drama, hierarchy, and personality cults, he did the opposite -removing excess, flattening status, and designing clothes that assumed the wearer was intelligent, capable, and busy living a real life.
Key aspects of his egalitarian stance include:
Anti-hierarchy: Lang resisted the cult of the designer-as-genius. He declined fashion’s social rituals, showing collections online early and stepping away from the industry at the height of his influence.
Functional respect: His clothes treated the wearer as competent and autonomous - designed to move, work, and live in, rather than to be looked at.
Gender and status neutrality: Silhouettes blurred masculine/feminine and executive/manual distinctions, challenging who fashion is “for.”
Moral minimalism: The absence of excess wasn’t aesthetic alone; it was ethical. Nothing unnecessary. Nothing manipulative.
That stance feels increasingly relevant to leadership.
Much of today’s leadership culture is still built around performance: confidence as theatre, vision as certainty, hierarchy as proof of worth. We reward those who look convincing, speak fluently, and take up space - often at the expense of those who can think systemically, bring quieter potency, listen carefully, or work with contradiction.
The result? Organisations that look well-led from the outside, but feel brittle from within.
An egalitarian approach challenges this. It doesn’t romanticise flatness or deny power, but it refuses to turn leadership into a personality contest. It treats leadership as a practice, not a performance - designed to be used, tested, and lived with under pressure.
At Oasis Human Relations, we see that the leaders who make the greatest difference are rarely the loudest. They are the ones who can stay present in uncertainty, distribute authority without abandoning responsibility, and create conditions where others can think clearly and act well.
Egalitarianism as relational practice
Oasis Human Relations expresses a strikingly similar ethos - again, not as rhetoric, but as how the work is done.
Across leadership development, coaching, governance, and organisational transformation, Oasis:
Refuses performative leadership: Oasis’ work is not about charisma, heroics, or image. It privileges capacity, judgement, and relationship.
Treats people as whole and capable: Participants are not ‘fixed’, managed, or dazzled. They are trusted as sense-makers within complex systems.
Works with power without fetishising it: we don’t deny hierarchy, but neither do we glorify it. Power is examined, distributed, and made discussable.
Designs for use, not consumption: Programmes are rigorous, embodied, and demanding - meant to be lived into, not consumed as content or credentials.
Practises ethical restraint: There is a clear avoidance of unnecessary frameworks, jargon, or over-engineering. What remains has heft.
Where Lang designed garments that could hold a life, Oasis designs spaces that can hold uncertainty, conflict, and transformation.
In a time of overlapping crises, we don’t need bigger leadership. We need better-designed leadership - rigorous, restrained, and ethical by default.
Less spectacle. More substance.
This blog series is an invitation into curiosity, honesty, and deeper leadership. We’re glad you’re here.
Nick Ellerby is a coach and Co-Director at Oasis Human Relations, one of a group of thirty plus practitioners working in partnerships across sectors as coaches, hosts, convenors, speaking partners, facilitators, researchers and changemakers.
Why not try a FREE Discovery Session to see if an Oasis Coach would be right for you? Just click on the button below.