Helmut Lang Jeans, Seen by Chloë Jones

For Fall 2026, Helmut Lang hands its denim to an Arkansas photographer who grew up in the hush around the rodeo – and finds the brand’s sharpest edge in the slow work of everyday life

A fashion campaign can arrive loud: a stadium of lights, a cast of famous faces, a concept you feel before you can name it. And then there is the version Helmut Lang has chosen for its Fall 2026 jeans – a version that begins not with a bang but with a barbed-wire fence, a strand of horsehair caught in the wire, and a pair of jeans with the faint outline of a Skoal tin worn into the back pocket.

The things people use every day eventually start to tell on them. That line, spoken by the photographer Chloë Jones, is the quiet thesis of the whole project.

Seen by Chloë Jones

For Fall 2026, Helmut Lang worked with Chloë Jones, a photographer based in Arkansas, to shoot Helmut Lang Jeans on a cast drawn from the rodeo world: bronc rider Lamarr Hankins, twin bull riders Dayna and Maddy Eilert, Miss Rodeo Oklahoma 2027 Carlee Smith, and farmer Zack Hollowell. The photographs were made across Arkansas and Oklahoma – and, crucially, away from competition, in the hours around it.

This is the campaign’s central gesture. Rodeos, as Jones notes, can be loud and chaotic. But most of the time spent around horses is nothing like that. You drive somewhere. Horses stand in the shade. Sisters ride double. A cow comes over to see what’s in a bucket. The images – Dash in the Yellow Flowers, Red Dirt, Fence Line, At the Trailer, Hay, Fern, Saddle, Split Reins, Stirrup – are portraits of that quieter arithmetic, the long middle of a life that only occasionally erupts into eight seconds of spectacle.

The Specificity of Denim

What makes the campaign feel so precisely Helmut Lang is the way it treats denim as a material with memory. Jones’s eye is trained on the details that most campaigns would smooth away: leather worn smooth where the hands go, a pair of jeans that already knows its owner’s body, the exact way denim falls over a boot.

“Everyone knew exactly how they wanted the denim to fall over their boots,” she says. “Jeans shift when you get on a horse, so the length matters. I loved that specificity.”

That specificity is the whole point. When Jones asked the riders what size jeans they’d need for the shoot, she got two or three measurements back instead of one – because a pair of jeans for riding is not a pair of jeans for standing. It is a tool, a uniform, a second skin, a record of a life. Denim fades where it is handled, and over time starts to look like it belongs to one particular person.

New Clothes Becoming Somebody’s Clothes

The campaign’s most tender observation is about transformation. “Everyone wore the denim like it was their own,” Jones says. “By the end of the day, each pair already looked like theirs. I wanted to catch that shift, when new clothes start becoming somebody’s clothes.”

It is a distinctly Helmut Lang idea – the brand that built its name on the austere, the minimal, the almost-nothing – applied to the most democratic garment in the world. Here, the brand’s signature restraint is not a design language but a way of seeing: let the fabric speak, let the wearer’s life do the styling, and let the camera simply be present for the moment a new thing becomes a lived thing.

The Hours Around It

The campaign also shows deep respect for the labor that surrounds the spectacle. “You take care of your horse, and then you take care of all the things you need to take care of your horse,” Jones says. “Saddles, ropes, boots, trailers, clothes.” For bull and bronc riders, the ride itself can come down to eight seconds. Most of the life around it is much quieter – catching a horse, hauling hay, driving somewhere, waiting for the heat to break, tending to animals, sitting around. Those were the hours Jones kept coming back to.

It is a fitting subject for Helmut Lang, a house that has always understood that the most powerful moda is often the least performative. In an era of endless, exhausting spectacle, Helmut Lang Jeans, seen by Chloë Jones, makes a radical argument: that the most compelling image is not the one that shouts, but the one that simply watches – and lets the vaqueros, and the life worn into it, do the talking.

Images Courtesy of Helmut Lang

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