Jil Sander (Q1925)
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German fashion house
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Jil Sander |
German fashion house |
Statements
2017
joint creative directors
2006
director of accessories
1990
creative chef
commercial commissions
Resort is a sort of prelude to Jil Sander’s spring (shown after the fact), where the Meiers embraced a darker, edgier tone. Hints of this shift started to emerge here, marking a departure from the enveloping sense of cocooning seen in previous seasons. Shiny fabrics, glossy leather, and sharper, more angular silhouettes —the designers were after high-contrast and tension. “Last winter it was more about sheltering into your own self-protective world,” they said. “Now it’s more about confronting reality, because there’s a lot of reality happening around us.”For the lookbook’s images, shot in a transitional between-rooms area with an artificial light that dissolved any sense of time, the Meiers looked at the work of Canadian photographer Greg Girard. His neon-hued, after-dark frames of urban landscapes influenced the use of slick surfaces that reflect tonality, as in a coated canvas with a papery effect crafted into an oversized trench coat, or the brown leather with a nocturnal sheen used for a three-piece suit.The Meiers have brought their own elegant yin/yang gesture to Jil Sander, creating visuals that read as a point of rest between opposing forces. Here their interplay was echoed in a series of edgy dichotomies: the delicate contrasted with the tough in a dress whose bodice, densely encrusted with pearls, evolved into an elongated black leather midi skirt. The fluidity of a shell-pink draped long dress with cape sleeves was set against the density of strong leather pieces; and cloud-like cotton organdy was crafted into a trapeze shift finely embroidered with tiny sinuous ruffles, which set off a sharp-cut white tuxedo coat with satin lapels.The symmetry between pretty and tough gave the collection poise, yet the vibe was definitely assertive. “It’s nice to offer people who appreciate our clothes a message of strength, so they can feel a bit tougher,” noted the Meiers. In times of hardship, fashion can convey a spirit of resistance.
16 December 2024
Lucie and Luke Meier pursued a darker, more powerful vision at Jil Sander today. Backstage they called it a reaction to the world environment. There’s an almost inescapable only-the-strong-survive quality to our current moment, so it’s somewhat surprising to see fashion leaning into prettiness. That was more or less the Meiers’ position last season, when they focused on swaddled shapes and feminine gestures. Their response this season seemed to have been tweaked for the harsh realities of our time.They took their cues from the work of the Canadian photographer Greg Girard, who was in the audience. His images of 20th-century cars and motel rooms appeared as prints, the former on a boxy shirt and pencil skirt and the latter on a caban and matching shift that complemented the show’s carpeted runway. Girard’s neon-lit nighttime photos also informed the collection’s palette, from the iridescent suiting for men and women that opened the show—jackets and pants (or shorts) matching shirt and tie—to the glossy brake-light red of a trench that came near the end. The tailored silhouettes had echoes of the 1940s and ’80s, fashion eras of outsized proportions; this was especially true of the double pleats and loose shape of the pants, but they managed to create a vibe without looking too retro.Talk of dark forces aside, the Meiers made room for light, softer elements. These took the form of a couple of dip-dyed shirt-and-skirt sets, a pastel midi-dress featuring scrolling decoration, and rib-knit separates with curving hems trimmed in little beads. They still have an eye for the handcrafted touches they were more intent on pre-pandemic, too, as seen in tops for both genders with inset crochet panels and three-dimensional floral embroidery.As for the Lonely Hearts pendant necklaces and a man’s sweater stitched with those same words? Maybe they spoke of an inner tenderness; under our hard shells there are sensitivities of all kinds. That’s what the final look, a bouquet-printed glossy black raincoat, appeared to be saying: I’m strong but also soulful.
18 September 2024
Fashion brands today work according to their own clockwork, as the concept of “seasonal” has been reduced to an elusive notion. This pre-fall bridges elements from Jil Sander’s spring and fall collections, yet following the laws of retail, it hits shop floors now, coinciding with this review. If you’d compare this timeline, say, with Netflix, it’s as if you were watching a series where the halfway point goes live well after the beginning and the end have been revealed. But this is fashion’s rather elastic playbook, where each label dictates its own set of rules.At a showroom appointment, the Meiers explained that this prequel anticipated their fall 2024 exploration of elegance; the thread seemed rather consistent, as there’s always a flair for the refined and a certain polish to what they’ve brought to Jil Sander. Smoothing hard-edged minimalism with an appreciation for honest craft and a sensual touch of couture is what they’re after. Here this yin-yang tension could be traced in sharp-shaped tunics softened by cape sleeves undulating with a graceful movement, or in streamlined cardi-coats with slit sleeves revealing the bare skin of arms, or else in inflated puffer ensembles, round-shaped and protective yet made in handsome dry checkered wool, which toned their sporty character down with a more urban attitude. Engineered pieces for both women and men blended craft and technology, one of the Meiers’ favorite dichotomies, giving the utilitarian an elevated look. Soft-padded, spongy knitwear and the indulgence of double-faced cashmere throughout made the case for the high-end “enveloping feeling” they were keen on highlighting.Sophisticated jewelry gave an ornamental twist to the purist Jil Sander silhouette. Pearls were embroidered across a guy’s black tabard, while the V-neckline of a boxy knitted jumper was encrusted with geometric metal shards. Without losing a sense of edge or looking too diluted by wardrobing concerns, both collections conveyed a quotidian vibe. “We want to see people actually wearing what we’ve designed; while we’ve kept some challenging elements, it isn’t only about image; it has to be both exciting and relevant for today.”
10 June 2024
Fashion brands today work according to their own clockwork, as the concept of “seasonal” has been reduced to an elusive notion. This pre-fall bridges elements from Jil Sander’s spring and fall collections, yet following the laws of retail, it hits shop floors now, coinciding with this review. If you’d compare this timeline, say, with Netflix, it’s as if you were watching a series where the halfway point goes live well after the beginning and the end have been revealed. But this is fashion’s rather elastic playbook, where each label dictates its own set of rules.At a showroom appointment, the Meiers explained that this prequel anticipated their fall 2024 exploration of elegance; the thread seemed rather consistent, as there’s always a flair for the refined and a certain polish to what they’ve brought to Jil Sander. Smoothing hard-edged minimalism with an appreciation for honest craft and a sensual touch of couture is what they’re after. Here this yin-yang tension could be traced in sharp-shaped tunics softened by cape sleeves undulating with a graceful movement, or in streamlined cardi-coats with slit sleeves revealing the bare skin of arms, or else in inflated puffer ensembles, round-shaped and protective yet made in handsome dry checkered wool, which toned their sporty character down with a more urban attitude. Engineered pieces for both women and men blended craft and technology, one of the Meiers’ favorite dichotomies, giving the utilitarian an elevated look. Soft-padded, spongy knitwear and the indulgence of double-faced cashmere throughout made the case for the high-end “enveloping feeling” they were keen on highlighting.Sophisticated jewelry gave an ornamental twist to the purist Jil Sander silhouette. Pearls were embroidered across a guy’s black tabard, while the V-neckline of a boxy knitted jumper was encrusted with geometric metal shards. Without losing a sense of edge or looking too diluted by wardrobing concerns, both collections conveyed a quotidian vibe. “We want to see people actually wearing what we’ve designed; while we’ve kept some challenging elements, it isn’t only about image; it has to be both exciting and relevant for today.”
10 June 2024
At Jil Sander, Luke and Lucie Meier said they were after “an enveloping feeling.” It’s not hard to understand why the designers are looking for softness. Pick a crisis, any crisis. But asked for specifics, Lucie had a question of her own: “Who doesn’t like comfort?” Indeed. That instinct led them to rounded silhouettes, double-face construction, and padding in the form of down coats that evoked pool inflatables and outerwear separates modeled on quilted bedspreads.Even the tailoring didn’t have any hard edges. Though the template Jil Sander established so successfully in the 1990s was minimal and sharp, here curves were everywhere: from the shoulders and sleeves of the swishy suits that opened the show in a blaze of red, celadon green, and chocolate brown—a welcome change of scenery from all the gray and black elsewhere—to cape coats with infinity hems.Rich textures were another running theme, selected to enhance a sense of nestling and cocooning. They leaned too much on the diamond quilting, and, let’s face it, there are limits to how far you can get out of the house in the furry shoes that many of the models wore. In general, the styling could’ve been taken down a notch or two. The over-ornamentation tended to distract from the calm, nurturing vibe the Meiers were trying to achieve.But the openwork crochet in bouclé wool and mohair that they used for tops and skirts looked like a dream to wear, as did the knit pieces that can be reversed—on the opposite side they looked almost like a shaggy shearling. “We like this blurring of the silhouette, a softening of the lines,” Lucie said. The musical stylings were provided by Mk.gee, a 26-year-old from New Jersey with a debut album out this month, who was very much on their atmospheric wavelength.
24 February 2024
Jil Sander the designer may have been the ultimate minimalist, but Jil Sander the brand is minimalist no more. Backstage, Lucie and Luke Meier explained that their spring collection was a study of shapes. There was nothing quite as standard as a two-piece suit. Instead, they cut jackets as boxy as squares and paired them with sailor-collar shirts and shorts to accentuate the silhouette. Or else they elongated their lines, showing duster coats on the guys and extending the men’s jackets nearly to the knees while raising the waistband of baggy shorts well past the navel. There was a looseness to their approach to tailoring; it suggested that they feel freer to play than they did in their earlier days at the label.That freer sensibility held true of other categories too. Button-down shirts were accessorized with metal discs on their collar points, like built-in jewelry, and vests came with twin portholes on the upper chest outlined in the same polished chrome. The portholes were a little on the large side, but you appreciated the instinct. No quibbles with the giant cat face prints on a couple of tunic dresses.The Meiers’ sharpest division from the Sander of old is in their knitwear. Modern knitting technology has made contemporary corporatewear newly comfortable, but the knit dresses that opened the show leaned less office appropriate than special occasion, with their clingy ribbed bodices blossoming below the waist into fuller skirts. Rhinestone necklaces further elevated the situation. The two dresses that closed the show were made from cotton, which they said they chose for its lightness. Their generous volumes, almost like carapaces, were made possible by the pleating on the back of the shoulders. Minimal? Maybe, but definitely statement making.
23 September 2023
Lucie and Luke Meier work on the men’s and women’s Jil Sander collections at the same time, so there’s an osmotic conversation between the two, which is also a reflection of the designers’ personal art-meets-life dialogue. “As an overarching approach, both collections share the same artistic integrity,” they said.For resort, precision was softened by a flair for the artisanal and for subtle decorative gestures. Lucie drew on her couture background to infuse the label’s structured concision with gentler clarity. She emphasized the tactile quality of textures—ribbed wool, crafty crochet, chenille 3D embroidery in the shape of leopard spots, cotton bouclé, and crunchy recycled polyester. Details like ruffles, handmade macramé intarsia, and featherlight balloon shapes spoke of a breezy, feminine feel.Silhouettes were kept either close to the body or very wide and short, highlighting a certain freedom in proportion-play; cue a lingerie-inspired, lace-encrusted short slip dress in white satin, worn under a sharp-cut, oversized boxy black blazer. Throughout the collection, boxy tailoring opposed fluid, slender shapes; it made for a dynamic masculine/feminine contrast, further energized by bursts of vivid colors. Adding an edge to the Meiers’ delicate decorative lexicon, jewelry was embedded into the garments—an imperfectly-shaped round metal disc replaced buttons and was built-in on a straight-cut jacket. On a similar note, a smooth, sculptural golden necklace was integrated into the neckline of a long slender jersey tunic, and could be removed to be worn with other things.
12 July 2023
“I don’t think that if menswear is going to be elegant it has to be tailoring,” said Luke Meier at a showroom appointment. It sounded like a flip-side POV in a moment when almost every label under the sun is chanting the tailoring mantra. But Luke and Lucie Meier’s line of thought is usually rather questioning.Working at a label that was one of the upholders of ’90s minimalism makes them inherently attuned to fashion’s current climate—they don’t need to jump on anyone else’s bandwagon. The set of rules they’ve inherited from Jil Sander’s ethos—sophisticated rigor, respect for quality, chic functionality—still underlies their practice. Yet for the Meiers, equating tailoring with fashion’s Holy Grail isn’t enough to chart new directions in menswear. “We love tailoring, but you don’t have to wear a jacket every day to look elegant,” they said.The spring collection offered an articulate interpretation of what they believe is a modern sense of style. Sporty and workwear references were treated to the designers’ refined approach: delicate touches—sparse embroideries, discreet yet handsome jewelry pieces, a few artistic prints— suggested a gentle smoothing of the angular sartorial choices they’re partial to.Blurring the lines between the utilitarian, the sporty and the formal is what today’s menswear is ultimately about. The Meiers’ directional take is to keep the garments’ workwear-inflected, structured functionality while amping up the sophistication. The suit of the season was composed, as in many other collections, by a broad square-cut, half-breast boxy jacket worn over short-shorts, or over an equally abbreviated skirt. Traditional shirts were entirely replaced by high-collared tops, textured knits, jacquard cropped tops, or mesh T-shirts. Foulards, necklaces and brooches felt expressive. The sartorial treatment was also given to a fully-fashioned tracksuit in bold bright green, which looked high-end-polished and dressed-up compared to its ordinary cut-and-sew counterparts. “You can look smart with a beautifully cut shirt with just a bit of a drape,” they said. “It’s not a tailored jacket, but it definitely looks chic.”
26 June 2023
Maybe it’s because they’ve rounded year five at the brand, but this felt like a more personal collection than usual for Luke and Lucie Meier at Jil Sander. “We kind of looked back at our formative years, the ’90s and 2000s,” said Lucie. “We were thinking about how the outlook was so positive and exciting, thinking about technology coming into our lives. Now the positivity about the future is more difficult to hold up.” Luke interjected: “It’s always a bit rose-tinted, the past, but the one resounding element here was that there was this openness to kind of cross contaminate things.”The first look made it clear that they no longer feel obliged to stick to the codes established by the German minimalist who founded the brand. It was a black and white leather motorcycle jacket, a logo embossed vertically down the front placket, with matching cropped pants reinforced at the knees like racing uniforms. Later on, a heavily pocketed vest worn by the model Maggie Mauer looked like it could’ve been lifted from Luke’s street-wear inflected men’s label OAMC.Jil Sander wouldn’t recognize much of the tailoring, but in a season of samey pantsuits, the Meiers’ streamlined, zip-front jackets and expandable trousers—worn with the zippers that extended down both legs undone, for an even bigger silhouette—were a fresh take.Bjork’s love song “All Neon Like” soundtracked the show, and her eccentricities sparked some of the ideas here, like the pretty degradé floral print dresses that were paired with nubby-soled sneaker boots. It was good to see he Meiers exercising their individuality, whether that was in the form of an airy, generously cut parachute dress embellished with crushed metal flowers or tunics and tees digitally printed and jacquarded with fruits and bonbons. Breaking free is a better way to describe those oversized cherries. “We wanted things that felt a bit uplifting,” Luke explained, “simple and positive.” Bags were stamped with more fruit, like sweet tins. “It’s an invitation,” he said.
24 February 2023
Lucie and Luke Meier’s practice at Jil Sander pivots around a balanced tension between opposites—a sort of art-meets-life dynamic, as the aesthetic they are after is very much a reflection of their personalities, their beliefs, and the lifestyle that goes with it. Their men’s pre-fall collection was a further confirmation of how the Meiers manage to find a congenial middle ground between contrasting elements.Menswear is in mutation, shedding its skin after years of ubiquitous street style and sportswear; formality is being revived with injections of comfort, and the gender-fluid discourse is the unavoidable subtext. Elegance isn’t anathema anymore, as the appreciation for tailoring and sartorial finesse has entered the picture as a fresh template—nuanced and diverse. The Meiers’ approach is definitely in alignment. “It would just be nice to see more sense of style around,” they said.This season they wanted to bring silhouettes and volumes to the couture level already introduced in the co-ed September show. It’s an aspect that resonates with the modern sophistication they’ve brought to Jil Sander, as they believe that “it’s all about making special things that stand out.” Here they inflected refinement with a dynamic sporty-ness. “This couture attitude is always very relaxed,” they mused. “But we definitely like a well-dressed look, more considered and put together.”Utilitarian elements were given a sartorial twist, and a bit of discreet, un-glitzy glamour was also infused in the mix. On this note, silver-hammeredbombébrooches were pinned on a workwear-inspired straight-cut shirt, while a full silver-chain necklace added subtle sparkle to a sharp-tailored black short suit, whose elongated and slightly flared jacket was a blueprint in the collection. It was worn over a pristine collarless white shirt, another distinctive theme, as shirting was explored in attractive variations. Removable high collars and detachable foulards introduced an element of softness on otherwise rigorous boxy shapes; shirt-jackets and A-line tailored shirt-overcoats were a substitute for jackets.Looking for different, visually stimulating graphics is also part of the designers’ search for expressive, artistic new paths.
The standout was a blown-up motif inspired by an exhibition Luke saw in New York of Richard Prince’s car series, whose haphazardly unfinished painted and sanded surfaces were rendered as pastel-colored, chalky abstract strokes needle-punched on cashmere tunics and jumpers. The effect was of intense, poetic precision. “Let’s make fashion more special,” summarized the Meiers. We couldn’t agree more.
26 January 2023
The mood Luke and Lucie Meier were after for pre-fall was that of “couture mixed with a sportier feel.” they said. “We like the attitude of elevated functionality, without compromising on interesting volumes and high-quality fabrics and execution.” A clear message indeed, one which they explored in their spring show.The Meiers are inquisitive, soul-searching designers, and questioning their practice is part of the equation. Highlighting the ‘opposites attract’ tension intrinsic to their aesthetic, they asked, “how do you make things that feel very immediate, fresh-feeling, and modern but also have this inherent couture rigor of technique and shape?”The dynamic between precision and glamour, or utility and sensuality played out throughout the collection, with silhouettes alternating between the voluminous and airy, and the slender and close to the body. Classic couture volumes like the cape, the balloon dress, and the opera coat were given a sporty twist and a comforting feel of ease through the counterintuitive use of high-end fabrics. A cape dress was made in thick jersey; a poufy floral-printed and pleated-plastron minidress was cut from papery recycled polyester. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a slender silhouette conveyed a more athletic, agile language in long silk ribbed knit dresses with racerback tops.Remarkable examples of their obsession with the hand-feel of materials were in evidence throughout. A fringed backless top in hand-knitted open-stitch with geometric motifs looked rather striking, as did both a sinuous ivory slip dress with embroidered ajour details and an asymmetrical floral-patterned guipure skirt. On a similar note, four different fabrics were cut into petal-shaped feathers, and then applied decoratively over a miniskirt and a sleeveless top. The effect was both light and luxurious.“Precious in a simple way,” was how the designers’ summarized the allure of the collection. Talking about luxury, whose meaning often eludes description, the Meiers have a strong opinion. “You want people to feel that there’s time and real consideration put into each piece we do, there’s a thinking, a respect, and appreciation for the level of craftsmanship, because skill requires time, you cannot have an amazing embroidery without the time to learn how to do it properly. This reflects our idea of luxury, which is time really.”
20 December 2022
The first season Luke and Lucie Meier designed Jil Sander, circa spring 2018, they put women and men on the runway. Soon after, the designers split the collections apart. “They needed separate nurturing,” they said backstage. It’s been five years that they’ve been at the helm here, and they’ve reunited them. “That’s how we design men’s, together with the women’s,” they explained.That point was made with the establishing looks: monochrome suits, loose in silhouette and light of color, that were modeled by both genders. “We asked ourselves what feels modern,” Lucie said. All of Milan has gone sexy (a not unusual tendency here in the spring season), but the Meiers have a different take on modernity. “We looked at clashing glamour into very simple workwear, our fundamental very simple pattern cutting and then doing things that are more eccentric,” Luke said. That might mean something as straightforward as cutting cargo pants in silk satin or as extravagant as pairing a strapless confetti sequined evening dress with sneakers.The Meiers have always incorporated craft into their work, but whereas in the past macramé and crochet gave their clothes an earthy sensibility, this collection had a shiny gloss—the glam factor. A tank top and midi-kilt were embellished with cloud-shaped mirrors, and the lineup’s single print was lifted from the L.A. street grid after dark, the turned-on lights making a graphic pattern. A knit dress was made using thick yarn with baked-in sequins, and there were feathers galore: peeking from the hem of a sleeveless cotton dress, wrapped around the neck, decorating the large clutch that was one of their bags of the season. Most luscious was the group of finale looks, whose excesses of sequined knit fringe bounced like jellyfish as the models padded down the gravel runway.If there was a downfall to putting the collections back together again, it was the repetition. The rain that fell on the outdoor location couldn’t be helped (hence the umbrellas in these pictures, a generous gesture), but the designers could have cut for length. There’s nothing as sexy as conviction.
24 September 2022
The yin-yang creative dynamic Luke and Lucie Meier have brought to Jil Sander isn’t just a reflection of the two of them sharing art and life, but also an echo of the big-picture conversation about the redefinition of identities around the intersection of masculine and feminine codes.“In our designs there’s always this tension between the masculine and the feminine,” they mused, Zooming from their studio in Milan. “It’s always there in some form or another.”The husband and wife pair complement each other with the same easy flair that they give their experiments between rigor and plasticity, severity and fluidity. They describe their process as an exercise in “searching and finding that right pull, whether it’s an artisanal gesture breaking something very strict, or something soft being broken by something very rigid and structured. That play is always there.”For resort their search for a point of symmetric repose between opposites played out in what they called “deflating couture,” a turn of phrase defining sculptural, elegant volumes “collapsing” into softer, gentler, fluid shapes. Seen through this lens, their suiting consisted of sharp-cut, narrow-shouldered, and fitted jackets worn over ultra-voluminous trousers, almost like next-generation palazzo pants. The sartorial is a territory the Meiers navigate skillfully, favoring extreme precision in cutting and construction as well as a romantic feel for the handcrafted; a case in point was a sharp-structured, overcoat in a pale mauve, without lapels, fastened with a single hand-blown glass jewel button, and worn over a black tunic with a feminine ruffled collar.The play between fluidity and structure gave the collection character and appeal, and was consistent throughout. An elongated dress of voluminous couture construction was made in delicate white cotton voile, a rather humble material; straight-cut tunics and tops with plunging necklines were given a transformable twist with the addition of turtlenecks or t-shirts in contrasting colors worn underneath. The season’s version of the tuxedo had a similar versatile approach; it was proposed as a fluid combination of a pleated-bib blackchemiseand a pair of billowy, liquid trousers. You cannot take the sense of rigorous chic out of the Meiers.
21 July 2022
Luke and Lucie Meier talked about “new beginnings, new worlds, looking into the future,” as the conceptual take on their Jil Sander men’s resort, an idea that certainly rhymes with a broader post-pandemic sentiment. But their IRL situation also influenced the collection’s feel for elevated utilitarian design.The Meiers just relocated into a new apartment, which frames their current family life. With little Ella Rose contributing giggles and squeaks to the Zoom conversation, looking into the future isn’t just a romantic notion, but a very real commitment. Personal memories also played a part in the collection’s mood; Luke Meier grew up on the West Coast of the U.S., and what he described as its “cultural openness... [that it’s] possible to reset and build something totally new, even without much support,” stayed with him as a message particularly meaningful in today’s circumstances. With the world turning towards conservatism, repression of human rights, and restrictions on personal freedom, “that spirit of bravery in confronting difficult situations is what resonates most with what’s happening around us,” he said. “You have to be brave to face what’s outside your apartment, just to step outside the door sometimes you have to feel brave.”The West Coast’s post-war attitude of self-invention, and “the idea of building and making something” translated into workwear, based on geometric, precise pattern-making and elevated into a sophisticated proposition through a sensibility of high-end luxury. Next to that, a more glamorous side “of what Hollywood feels like” was explored, filtered through the Meiers’ composure and subtle eye for refinement.The utilitarian purity of practical garments, which they called “honest,” provided a canvas for experimenting with inventive takes on suiting and sartorial options. Kilts and skirts replaced bermudas, and were offered in long pleated versions worn with very simple vests, round-collared boxy t-shirts, or elongated tops; high-waisted pleated trousers in fluid wool were cut with generous proportions and paired with hard-pressed shirt-jackets, or with slender overcoats.Jewelry punctuated the collection, giving it a sensitive touch of glamour and mitigating its rigorous approach. Strands of pearls decorated the neckline of double-faced cashmere vests; hammered-silver brooches were pinned on delicate silk knits; embroideries with glass beads on straight-cut shirting and iridescent sequined tops added sparkle.
“It felt nice to be a bit more eccentric,” underlined Lucie.On the same decorative note, hand-painted elements—a vintage cigarette lighter, a set of motel’s keys—were printed on boxy shirts; and the skinny silhouettes of palm trees lining long roads “as shot through a car window” were reproduced on jacquard knits or in fil coupé in dégradé colorways, conveying a sunset feeling and the romantic longing for a free-spirited life. “The idea of freedom that the West Coast gave to people at that time feels more necessary than ever, since the opposite is happening today,” concluded Luke. Hard to disagree with that.
4 July 2022
In a season when designers are targeting Gen-Z, Jil Sander’s Lucie and Luke Meier made clothes for grown-ups. That kind of commitment breeds loyalty in women of a certain demographic and income bracket who feel left out of the fashion conversation. “We were thinking about elegance,” Lucie said backstage. “We really wanted to focus on sculptural tailoring, almost couture-like, but we like this new energy, a very cropped silhouette.”Come fall the Jil Sander woman will be wearing a wool skirt suit, its jacket sculpted with an hourglass volume and the skirt just peeking out from beneath its hem, or a slightly longer, flippier skirt with a cape-like jacket. Completing the silhouette were Chelsea boots with gold hardware, flat and sturdy. Dresses with the same above-the-knee proportion and flat bows at the shoulders and waist called to mind Pierre Cardin, whose death in late 2020 has precipitated new interest in his brand of ’60s minimalism.There were longer, softer lengths as well, including on a group of black dresses whose special details—a deep-v neckline, say, or voluminous bell sleeves—gave them a lot of cost-per-wear value.The Meiers have made handcrafts—macramé, crochet, and the like—an essential part of their Jil Sander aesthetic. This season they pared that back, featuring only one print of astrological signs on drapey stretch jersey or quilted satin, choosing three-dimensional fabrics with surface appeal, like the bouclé on a pair of short dresses and the finer gauge knit of a long dress with fuzzy mohair sleeves. The exception was the guipure lace they used for a trio of long dresses, including one in a sensational shade of marigold. The white and black versions were shown with tailored single-breasted jackets, which is indeed a very elegant, very grown-up way to approach black-tie.
26 February 2022
An enormous lantern was suspended between the vaults and pillars of the American Cathedral on Avenue George V in Paris like a big, bright sun casting its rays over Jil Sander’s models. Serenaded by an intensely elated soundtrack by Panda Bear and Animal Collective, the mood was quite hippie. There’s always been a puritanical quality to the work of Lucie and Luke Meier, but in this collection, it transitioned into a more articulated Kumbaya. That sensibility was carried by lots of crochet wrapped around necks and heads and spliced with oversized blazers and tuxedo jackets that couldn’t have made for a bigger contrast.“We liked this really elegant, masculine silhouette, but with a sensual side to it, as well,” Lucie Meier said after the show. “We start a lot with tailoring, just to see what we really want to do and say and what we care about. But this time, we worked it into typically feminine techniques as well,” Luke Meier added. The meeting between crochet—the emblem of granny chic—and strong tailoring made for expressions that were more focused on trend and statement pieces than previous proposals from the Meiers, whose collections usually feel more centered around the idea of a wardrobe. Backstage, Lucie pointed as to why: “You kind of miss people who really dress up and have a kind of eccentricity,” she said, referring to the way the pandemic has cramped our collective style, or at least our opportunity to show off said style.As a symbol of “personality and individuality,” Luke said, the designers scattered astrology prints and zodiac embroideries around the collection, intensifying the hippie energy of it all, only to contrast it with the rigidity of sharp lapels poking out from layers under jackets and suit trousers tucked into hard, pointy Santiago boots with metal heel caps. It was a bold proposition for post-pandemic self-expression, but one the aspiring street style stars of fashion week will no doubt embrace.
21 January 2022
That the celebration of individuality is the creative driver underpinning most fashion practices today isn’t lost on Luke and Lucie Meier. “For us it’s really important, the idea of working around the character,” they said on a Zoom call. “The person in its humanity and uniqueness is at the center of our creativity.”What the Meiers have brought to Jil Sander is a progressive yet thoughtful approach, articulated with intelligence in a narrative both consistent and nuanced. Their repertoire is expanding; whimsy and eccentric flair now embellish their disciplined, exacting range. “We’re not considering stereotypes, rather multifaceted attitudes and personalities. Human beings are complex animals,” they said, suggesting that inspiration finds its way through a texture of emotions and connections, leaving excessive analyzing in the background. “We’ve been thinking a lot about our friends, people we know, even ourselves, all the different emotions we’ve been through. So it just felt right to be almost more impulsive, to indulge the spur of the moment, enjoying a certain freshness and lightness.”The pre-fall lineup was bookended by two similar looks, both two-piece propositions—a sharp-cut top/skirt ensemble in ivory double-faced matte viscose knit, compact and sculptural; and a turtleneck/skirt combination in off-white ribbed wool. Beautifully embroidered with sequined crochet intarsia at the collar, on the sides, or at the hem, they draw attention to the decorative as a subtext to Jil Sander’s sartorial clarity. “Both looks have a chandelier kind of shape, they look rather decadent. It’s nice to offer something special, less ordinary.” Not that ordinary is a term that ever comes to mind regarding Jil Sander.The collection’s standouts exuded the boldness and confidence of one-of-a-kind pieces. Among the noteworthy examples: an exquisite bias-cut evening dress in soft undyed silk in a pearly shade of ivory, its skirt opening up in a corolla shape garlanded with long silky fringes; a cocooning wrap coat in spongy wool in a delicate hue of eau-de-Nil, jacquarded with a curlicued abstract motif, abavoletat the back sporting twirled fringes made from the yarn; and a sharp-cut skirt suit in black double-faced wool, embroidered with an inserted guipure piece breaking the severity of the design.
Throughout the collection, silhouettes were slim and close to the body, not too voluminous; tailoring was inflected with the designers’ appreciation for workwear and menswear, and rendered with fluid precision. As always with the Meiers, tactile, rich textures had a feel of the hand—devoré and hammered velvets, chenille, luscious Italian double-faced wools.“It’s about eclectic elegance and strong individuality,” they said.
16 December 2021
Lucie and Luke Meier made a life change this year—maybe the biggest kind of life change. They had a baby girl in June. That kind of development can alter a designer’s perspective, and backstage they discussed their new point of view: “It’s about embracing a positive future,” Lucie said. “Yes,” interjected Luke, “kids are a material reminder that the future has to be better.”In their four years at Jil Sander the Meiers haven’t often talked about emotions; in the past, at least, they’ve been more comfortable discussing the cut and line of their clothes. This season the cut and line were, at turns, boxy and oversize (see: the lapel-less jackets) or lightly nipped (the dresses that cinched at the lower back with medallion jewelry). Those details are important, they’re what separate the grownups from the kids, after all; but they’re only part of why people shop for and buy fashion. In the end, it often comes down to emotion. And tapping into personal emotions—it doesn’t have to be the love that young parents know for their newborn, or the hope they have for her future—is bound to make a collection feel more connected.That’s what this Jil Sander collection felt: more connected to real life. Chalk that up to all the denim, which was cut loose and slouchy and in washes beyond basic indigo. Or chalk it up to the models’ mules and boots, which were chic yet still friendly, with, as a colleague put it, the attitude of a high-heel but the comfort of a low one. Either way it was believable and persuasive.The starkest change since the last time the Meiers put a live show on the runway was the color palette. Fall 2020—a lifetime ago—was mostly black and white, with a flash of red. Here, they experimented with a range of pastels and brights, and added in some zebra print for good measure. The purple-ish tone of the overheads made the colors shift as the looks came down the long runway. “We’ve learned not to take things too seriously,” said Lucie. That came across clearest in a couple of outfits at the end, which layered sequin-embroidered shifts over trousers and boots. Those sequined shifts count as a real departure for the Meiers: loose, playful, and fun.
22 September 2021
“This collection is really about individuality, about the uniqueness of the person—we really cared about the human [aspect],” said Luke Meier on a Zoom call. What we experienced in quarantine, he explained, was “the feeling of longing for special people in our lives, the interesting characters we missed, the importance of interaction.”The dialogue between fashion and art, “how they fit together,” as Meier said, isn’t just an important conceptual component in his and his wife Lucie’s fashion practice; it’s also one of the central topics of their course at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where they head the fashion department. “For us it’s always about how good design can enhance the individual life of a person and the beauty that surrounds that person. It shouldn’t be just about making an object that’s beautiful,” said Luke. “In everything artistic there should be something functional, and it has to be at the service of the person,” chimed Lucie. Given this line of thought, “the ideas and philosophy behind the Bauhaus movement became relevant references for us,” she said. Resort was about harmonizing artistic gestures of decoration with the clarity of design and purpose they’ve brought to Jil Sander.Each piece was given an individual character, in a sort of syncopated yet quite cohesive narrative. What tied the eclectic offering together was a sense of soft playfulness, smoothing the edges of sculptural silhouettes inspired by the graphic lines of Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet costumes. Undulating ruffles, fringed tassels, feathers, studwork, and statement jewelry gave grace to neat, elegant shapes. A dramatic sleeveless black-top-and-round-skirt ensemble in guipure lace, a chic strapless trapeze dress in off-white silk gazar, and a sleek pantsuit with a detachable round capelet also in silk gazar—one of the collection’s main fabrics, “as it holds the shape beautifully”— all looked like they came out of a couture atelier. Lucie’s work at Dior as co–creative director after Raf Simons’s departure in 2015 seemed to gently resurface. “There are elements of couture,” she said, “but I like to keep them light and playful, with a more casual, lighthearted attitude.”The Meiers’ flair for the artisanal, which they integrate into their equal fondness for rigor, was in evidence in a deep-dyed multicolored summer dress with brushstrokes across the bodice.
It signaled a more lively use of color and patterns elsewhere, as in a slim leather overcoat printed with a figurative motif of dancing women, painted by an illustrator friend. “It’s stark but jovial,” joked Luke. It was a rather accurate summing up of the collection’s mood—the joviality certainly induced also by the recent arrival in the Meier family of little Ella Rose, who made a sleepy cameo appearance at the end of the Zoom call.
16 July 2021
Two-and-a-half weeks ago, Lucie Meier gave birth to a daughter. “It’s three of us now,” said her husband and co-creative director Luke, who shared a photograph of baby Ella Rose dressed in a crisp, white gown with delicate lace and embroideries: the infant incarnation of her parents’ puritanical vision at Jil Sander. Lucie hadn’t tried to hide her pregnancy, but since everyone outside her studio had only seen her neck-up on a Zoom call for the last nine months, no one realized. “I worked until a week before, but it’s good to be two,” she said. “Luke could take over.”They had begun working on their men’s collection some three months into the pregnancy, so, as Luke pointed out, “I don’t know if it’s conscious and present in the work yet.” The designers were, however, more reflective about the fashion world than normal. On a video call from Milan, Luke lamented fashion’s commercialization of parts of the sports- and streetwear that shaped him (he spent eight years at Supreme), and fondly remembered the eclecticism and individuality of New York street style in the early 1990s.“You’d see people on the street who’d be able to mix things like tailoring with an interesting piece of jewelry and something more functional like a parka. We were thinking about Jean-Michel Basquiat or Glenn O’Brien, these seminal New York characters,” he said. “Now, things are a bit uniform: there’s ‘this kind of person’ and ‘that kind of person.’ It’s nice to see people going for something that’s not considered the coolest thing of the moment.” While their collection was a reaction to uniformity, uniforms were undeniably present.Between utility suits, flight suits, strictly-belted tailored suits, and slender leather shirts with matching leather ties, there was an air of tonal, monumental dressing, which did go hand-in-hand with the industrial influences of the post-modern New Yorker artist wardrobe, but also evoked more symbolic uniforms of the post-war era. That wasn’t on the mood board, but the designers explained that the look they had in mind was about interrupting familiar or generic lines with pieces that express a certain individuality.That’s why colorful silken and fluffy foulards were tied around necks, why suits were bejeweled with jingly grape brooches, or why trousers were wildly magnified. It’s why a pink granny cardigan suddenly popped up, then a sexy cheetah print gilet, then a jumper motif that seemed to have zoomed in on a fragment of a multi-colored argyle pattern.
Those graphic, color-block elements were nods to Donald Judd, whose SoHo building Luke would pass every day, admiring its Dan Flavin installation, when he lived in New York.Embroideries on the knees of trousers featuring the wordsVentureandParadise(“we just liked the words,” Luke said) had been lifted from an old grocery store advert and treated with the utmost savoir-faire; as had a similar old-school advert that readFunalongside a price tag, interpreted in a jacquard and intarsia knitted vest (a fairly ironic statement for Jil Sander, a brand that is many things but rarelyFun!). “The idea of taking the banal and elevating it was the spirit of the approach to art in New York at the time, post-Warhol Pop,” Luke said. “It doesn’t have to be loaded with reference, it can just be graphically arresting.”After being stuck in the same places for so long, with the selfies of social media as our only real window to people-watching, this re-emergent period could trigger the individuality the Jil Sander designers are hoping to experience in the street once again. “I miss those characters and that world,” Luke said. “I don’t know if it’s because we’ve been stuck inside so much, but I just want to see some interesting people.”
27 June 2021
Two days after our digital preview, Jil Sander’s Japanese parent company announced it would be selling the brand to Only the Brave. Owned by Diesel founder Renzo Rosso, the group is known for championing adamant creativity with a portfolio that includes John Galliano’s Maison Margiela and Francesco Risso’s Marni. While this Jil Sander collection was business as usual for Lucie and Luke Meier—who will remain as creative directors under Rosso’s patronage—they did shoot it in anhôtel particulierin Le Marais currently “under construction.”Timed for fall, the Meiers’ collection proposed clothes as tools for giving a purpose to people’s step in the wake of the pandemic. “It’s a time of change for everybody. To be able to achieve change you need to feel empowered to do so. The way you dress changes the way you feel about yourself,” said Lucie. Luke added: “You want people to feel better, to feel good, strong, powerful; that this is our future. This is our medium to do so.” Within the purist frames of their expression, they conveyed that message in hints of boldness, from the decisive sculpting of coats and skirts to hand-spun dresses with fringing cascading from the bias, and lingerie dresses with glamorous lashings of lace. Big, ornate crystals made princely appearances.But there was a clinical undertone to the collection that served as a testament to our current crisis mode. Long gloves may have had an operatic air about them, but they were crafted in unlined leather and medical pastels that easily evoked our pandemic reality. Similarly, vegan leather trousers creased synthetically on the skin, invoking a surgical mood. “Somebody said, ‘Ah, you’re doing gloves because you don’t want to touch anything now?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah…I guess so?’” Luke reflected, crediting his subconscious with the faintly alarming character that eventually formed in the collection.Inadvertent or not, it’s the disquieting or slightly “wrong” elements that make Jil Sander interesting; that make one collection stand out from the other amid the purism that encompasses the Meiers’ universe. The designers have proven they can master a wardrobe that quietly but solidly evolves with every season. Under their new ownership—and with Rosso’s encouragement—they will likely have the opportunity to embrace those elements in a bigger way; a more dramatic fashion proposal.
Once we return to the real world and our transitional wardrobe has done its duty, fashion will no doubt be expecting some big gestures.
7 March 2021
The feelings of distance caused by the pandemic only intensify as it drags on. “I haven’t seen my family since early February last year, just because of distance and quarantine and all those things,” said Luke Meier on a video call from Milan. An ocean away from his native Canada—and communicating through satellites and digital connections—you imagine a boy could feel a bit lost in space, sitting in a tin can far above the world. Perhaps that’s what unconsciously imbued his and Lucie Meier’s Jil Sander collection with a certain alien sensibility.Shot in the derelict Château de Franconville north of Paris, a sombre short film showed models wandering around its dilapidated salons in sober humdrum. There were a few of them there, but the mood was unmistakably solitary. Expressed through the Meiers’ puritanical lens, our moment in time had inspired a collection nestled in the desire for tactility, cosiness and self-protection that defines it. “I’m sure a lot of people have brought up the context of where we are since the pandemic started,” said Luke, referring to his designer peers, but that didn’t make it any less pertinent to our evolving wardrobe.Between their enveloping wool coats, elongated tailoring, roomy knitwear, fluid overshirts and comforting knitted collars, a more abstract interpretation of our wardrobe mindset than mere ‘comfort-wear’ took shape. Clinical wellies in dusty tonal colors evoked those worn with quarantine suits in science fiction (think secret alien desert station on the X-Files)—an image echoed in a shiny-coated cotton coat—and leather sashes easily conjured visions of spaceship uniforms. Most expressive of the feeling were woven metal necklaces and breastplates, and primitive pendants that spelled out “Mother.” Cue Lieutenant Ripley.Irresistible references aside, the pieces spelled out the emotions of solitude and loss of familial contact Luke was talking about. “The letter forms are very simple. It’s the feeling he could have just found the metal and made it himself. But it’s very close on his body,” Lucie said. Sewn onto coats and knitwear were panels of frayed canvas printed with photographic portraits of flamboyant young female art students at the Bauhaus shot by Florence Henri in the 1920s. Worn by the un-eccentric young men that made up the cast, the effect wasn’t camp but very human; the male idea, perhaps, of missing a formidable female family member or friend. “It’s a show of familial affection,” Luke noted.
The Meiers’ deeply serious design practice can feel stark or cold, but between its muted colors and themes of loneliness and longing there was an expressed emotional core to this collection that gave it warmth. “There’s a certain personal approach here. I try most of the things on, and I wear most of the pieces,” Luke said. It was a human touch partly communicated through an alien one, but as we know, even E.T. was dying to phone home.
24 January 2021
Amid our ongoing stay-at-home situation, designers have embarked on a style crusade against #sweatpantsfatigue. Although each one of them is proposing their own creative vision, the same sentiment is widely shared, and the approach that rings true means acknowledging the need for comfort while elevating the proposition expressively, infusing a sense of dream and joy into the mix.“Fashion is always a commentary,” reflected Luke Meier. “It’s actually a very reactionary phenomenon, in that it reacts towards the zeitgeist, the moods and emotions of people or else towards a certain music or artist. So it’s only right that now you feel that need for ease in collections. What’s happening, it’s just impossible to ignore no matter how much designers are prone to live in a sort of creative bubble.” Lucie Meier chimed in during a Zoom call from the Jil Sander showroom: “This is presently the world we have to face, so we felt that in our work, it is really important that we’re not totally in dreamland. Our reality dictates today a different approach, whereas in other moments as a designer, you gravitate more towards a different set of references and inspirations. But we really felt that this is now and you just can’t ignore the different way we’re interacting together.”Having quarantined in their apartment in Milan, the Meiers wanted the collection to convey a more homey feel, albeit rendered with their exacting sophistication. To further channel the message, the look book was shot in an apartment, a modernist space mirroring the polished minimalism they favor. You cannot expect a Jil Sander collection framed by hyperbolic baroque opulence. However, sensitive to the mood-lifting role fashion has to play now, they introduced a touch of spirited softness, a sort of feel-good factor which complemented the collection’s yin-yang dynamic between the ease of sporty practicality and the elegance of their chic, angular tailoring. Case in point: slightly oversized masculine blazers, whose straight-cut precision was contrasted by the delicately embroidered circle skirts and slender yet luscious dresses they were worn with. This year’s ubiquitous track pants were elevated in soft Nappa leather and worn under a collarless, sharp-cut jacket. It made for a cool silhouette, a kind of of-the-moment alternative to the classic tailored pantsuit.The intimacy, warmth, and protection we’re all craving inspired a series of great knitted pieces.
An oversized wool-silk sweater was wrapped with a huge matching scarf, while a form-fitting, sporty ribbed dress opened to reveal soft cashmere leggings underneath, its exaggerated collar becoming an enveloping cape when unzipped.A floral jacquard fil coupé dress introduced a slightly decorative flair, while delicate colors—pistachio green, lilac, and anise—further smoothed the collection’s cultivated precision. In that vein, artsy Bauhaus-inspired jewelry, including golden ribbon-shaped portrait necklaces and sculptural bracelets, added a dash of vibrance, while oversized bags in luxurious, supple leathers looked comforting and pillowy in a tactile, playful way. “Let’s be realistic—fashion isn’t going to cure the problems we’re in today,” the Meiers concluded. “But if putting on something beautiful elevates our mood a little, if we can provide something that’s inspiring as much as it’s practically useful, that’s then us doing a good job.”
4 December 2020
Lucie and Luke Meier have been back in the Jil Sander studio since May. They’re thoughtful about the lockdown and the changed new world that they returned to, but resolved. “We’re going about life in a normal way, just wearing masks,” Lucie said on a Zoom call. Their new collection for the brand, where they recently rounded their three-year mark, responds to some of the shifts we’re all living through, with more time at home and fewer social engagements to buy for. Luke said they emphasized daywear, for instance.To be sure, there are no stay-at-home sweatsuits in the Meiers’ new lineup. Instead, Lucie said, they “softened” their tailored silhouette and added sheer organza to the mix for a more “intimate” sensibility. In a video they filmed for the season, models clutched pillowy, unstructured bags designed to feel “comforting to carry.” The collection is enlivened by zingy shots of gold and yellow amid its neutrals: flat metallic leather boots that extend above the knee, a sunny dress that follows the line of the torso but flares gently below the hips.Minimalism is integral to the Jil Sander brand. The Meiers have a command of that, but their instincts lean crafty; they like clothes with a human touch. That came across this season in the hand-crocheted overlays worn on top of slip dresses and in the way a shawl was tied voluptuously over the shoulders of a sleeveless tee. A pair of hourglass-y color-block sheaths were a surprise, a glimpse of a more carnal side that felt especially new in the context of Jil Sander. They could make for an intriguing line of inquiry.
8 October 2020
The exacting vision that Lucie and Luke Meier have brought to Jil Sander is softening with time. Relaxing into their roles after three years as creative directors, they now use the house codes with the ease that comes from owning them—as the saying goes, you can break the rules only if you know the rules well.Menswear is their natural territory: Their design principles align with the classic tailoring techniques that are essential in this category. “We really appreciate the technical aspect of the construction that goes into proper menswear-making,” Luke said during a showroom appointment (a rather enjoyable experience after the digital overload we’ve been all exposed to). “But I think that we’ve played with those ‘foundations’ our own way, proposing something different, not quite as rigid and formal but still very properly done.” Lucie chimed in: “Especially in the context of right now, we wanted to soften things a bit, introducing a friendlier, more tactile feel to our design.”As is often the case with the Meiers, the collection bridged opposites: rigidity and suppleness, geometry and sensitivity, touch and sight. Their rigorous aesthetic finds is enlivened by delicate details. Take for example, the sleeves of a sharp-cut, angular coat in Japanese wool that can be shortened or detached by gently twisting a small metal loop ring—utilitarian in purpose, but looking like a tiny piece of jewelry. Elsewhere, the severe, elegant lines of elongated blazers, often worn over apron tops, are gently interrupted by the soft intervention of a foulard, twisted and knotted nonchalantly at the waist, or around the neck.Tactility and abstraction found a middle ground in beautifully textured knitwear, where raw-cotton surfaces were veiled with a thin layer of cotton voile stitched onto the crocheted structure, expressing modesty and reserve.Detachable collars, humongous canvas totes, toolbox waistbags, and patches stitched onto knitted tops were all printed with evocative messaging about nature. “There’s a little bit of text around,” mused Luke. Words likeYellow Moon,Blue Windows Behind the Stars, andHomegrownalluded “to an idea of nature’s bounty [that] we were kind of missing in lockdown.” Actually, the world looked magnificent outside our quarantined homes—the sky bluer, nature more powerful and dense. “Let’s hope that people will look around a little more, appreciate the immediate environment we’re in,” reflected Luke.
“You probably want people to be a little more sensitive, you want them to notice something, you want them to feel what surrounds them. To think a bit more and more deeply.”
16 July 2020
If the pandemic has made us consider a more thoughtful, responsible approach to fashion consumption and an appreciation for the consistency of values expressed by a labels’ ethos, then Jil Sander’s Lucie and Luke Meier could find themselves in a good position. “In a certain way, the pandemic has just reaffirmed what we believe in,” they said during their resort presentation, held at the brand’s showroom in Milan. “This tragic situation has made people take a long, hard look at themselves, their habits, their values. It’s what we’ve done. We really still find that our path is a good one; our philosophy hasn’t changed.”The Meiers have built their fashion credentials around an almost obsessive care for quality, creating pieces that stand the test of time while being of the moment, with an emphasis on great execution. The human touch of craftsmanship is paramount to their aesthetic. The focus on these codes, and on a style that is a sensitive balance between practicality and fragility, between functionality and femininity, has become even sharper during the lockdown. “We had the time to fine-tune everything,” they explained. “And when we came back, we felt quite strong about the resort edit we’ve done.”Their overarching conceptual approach hasn’t wavered: “We don’t think that the Jil Sander woman really changes,” they said. “She cares about really good design, beautiful fabrics, pieces that are very well made; all these elements are now becoming more important than ever. People will probably consume less but better; they still want to treat themselves to a beautiful piece.”There’s always an undercurrent of functionality and practicality to the Meiers’ work on Jil Sander’s signifiers; it probably became a little more prominent than usual for resort. “We were obviously imagining more daily-life than occasion dressing, so certain decisions were made through the lens of what would we need or want in the immediate future,” they said. Yet for the creative duo, the utilitarian is always imbued with a certain poetry, and the functional hides the subtly ornamental. “Sometimes the way garments are constructed—the hand-stitching, the cut, the micro-pleating—becomes beautifully decorative,” they pointed out.For resort, the designers favored pure silhouettes, together with their flair for style opposites: strong proportions and sensible fabrics; a masculine sharpness of cut and delicate choice of colors.
Shapes were kept sculptural but softer than usual; suiting was given a chic modernist feel, as in a sharp-cut masculine blazer in cream wool silk gazar paired with a circle-cut, cone-shaped asymmetrical matching skirt. Contrasting the restraint the designers favor, a comforting, pillowy padded blanket cape in high-shine egg white silk satin with baby blue inserts was thrown languidly over a feminine double-cashmere sleeveless dress, its ankle-grazing circular hem undulating gently.The emphasis on craft and on folkloric references, reworked through the Meiers’ lens, was well represented in one of the collection’s pièces de résistance: A clean-cut, starch-pleated dress in butter yellow linen inspired by peasant garb was appliquéd on the sleeves with embroidered jacquard inserts, woven by a family in Sardinia with traditional local techniques. It made for a compelling contemporary interpretation of a traditional costume. While the vernacular decorative elements were reduced to modern abstract motifs, they still sensibly connected the dress with its origins and identity. It looked gorgeous and utterly desirable—who says that lockdown has quenched the thirst for a beautiful piece and for a moment of true fashion frisson?
8 July 2020
Lucie and Luke Meier have nestled into a groove at Jil Sander. Backstage talk about the house founder’s legacy and whether or not the Meiers do it due diligence seems beside the point. Shoppers have shorter memories than fashion editors, and the duo’s Jil clothes have the look of now.Tonight’s show was dramatically staged, with wooden chairs arranged in a round-edge rectangle in the center of the runway. The models walked the perimeter and took their seats. Backstage Lucie and Luke talked about capturing movement and emotion, and the sense of stillness the models inhabited set off both. More broadly (and like other bigger-name brands), the Jil designers understand the limitations of the runway; up and back a catwalk feels not enough to justify the work that goes into these collections. Graceful staging cast these clothes in a flattering light. They’re not noisy or brash or made for Instagram. The Meiers practice a more considered sort of fashion, one that puts primacy on subtlety. They work in a fairly narrow color palette—black and white or ivory, a range of neutrals, and only the odd bright red—preferring to convey luxury either through surface detail or texture.Purity, not minimalism, is the way they describe their aesthetic. Which is fair considering the workmanship that goes into the silk fringing and the chenille knitting and the extensive pleating we saw here. A botanical print erred on the anonymous side. The most compelling pieces were the ones that had a substance to the hand, be that a robe coat in a looped bouclé or blanket dresses for evening that encircled the shoulders in fuzzy wool. That silky black chenille keeps coming back to mind. These are elegant, smart-woman clothes designed not to challenge but to flatter. There are eager customers for that, and more and more it is the Meiers that are capturing their attention.
19 February 2020
In 2001 two young students, one Canadian, one Swiss, became fellow tenants of a shared Florence apartment. Something flowered. Tonight, Luke and Lucie Meier returned to the city to show the professional fruit of their creative union: Jil Sander.Since its adoption by the Meiers in 2017, Sander has effectively reclaimed its core identity—tailored minimalism—and here in the ancient refectory of Santa Maria Novella, the couple served a collection concocted to meet the tastes of the label’s faithful devotees. There were lots of high-volume suiting and outerwear in stark colorways and luxurious materials, with certain details planed away (revers, pocket flaps) and others emphasized (turn-ups, bicolor epaulettes). Chunky molded-sole leather shoes were the pediment.During their time together, the Meiers have also nurtured a sophisticated system practice that reflects their own studiedly ascetic aesthetic. Their design, like their manner, is at first sight undemonstrative to the point of seeming withdrawn but this is something they, and their audience, appear to like: Their clothes challenge you to dig for detail and excavate your own conclusions.Personally, mine were totally wrong. I pretty confidently surmised during the show that the three huge heaps of marigolds, the mirrored pearlescent beading, the beaten silver necklaces, and the woven, fringed panels applied to color-drained Shetland knitwear, plus the mention in the wan press release of “echoes of traditional Western and Eastern handicraft,” amounted to a Sander-isedly dyspeptic “echo” of Indian craft. “No,” said Luke of this theory when asked, before generously adding: “but I like that, I like that idea, although it was not intended to be that.”This reviewing game is all about sleuthing for an encapsulating narrative message that summates a collection and that isn’t utter phooey. So perhaps more on the money—starting again with the marigold clue—was nearby; in the complex of the Santa Maria Novella stands an ancient pharmacy dating back to the 13th century in which balms and salves have been concocted from calendula for generations. This created a connection to the fine silk tassels—confession box Catholic, but here mostly in monochrome—that sparked thoughts of local historical attire, as did a carefully roughened white habit/throw that passed us late in the collection.But scrap all that, because maybe the true source of the reference doesn’t matter.
Another approach is that the inscrutability of this collection—and the Meiers’ method more broadly—is key to its appeal. These were clothes that didn’t provide answers, but prompted questions. Lucie spoke of wanting to make garments with lifetime appeal—“cherishable clothes”—and what could be more cherishable than a life partner that is never completely understood?
8 January 2020
Husband and wife duo Luke and Lucie Meier are the epitomes of the yin-yang dynamics at play chez Jil Sander. He is intense and inquisitive, mostly dressed in black; she is angelic and luminous, mostly dressed in neutrals. A similar dialogue of codependent opposites runs through the collections they design, a balancing act of precision and grace, severity and indulgence.Having been appointed as creative directors in 2017, their vision for Jil Sander is evolving with confidence. A few unnecessary hard edges have been cleverly smoothed, and Pre-Fall proved to be a rather serene negotiation between restraint and release. Tinged with an artsy appreciation for craft and a mindful, cultivated attitude, their version of the label’s minimalist roots is progressively becoming warmer and more expressive. Even a certain sensuality and a fluidity, aspects not usually associated with such rigorous aesthetics, are now creeping in—obviously seen through disciplined eyes.Cases in point were the feminine lines of the décolletages, borrowed from corsetry and delicately lined with inconspicuous embroideries. Heart-shaped and graceful, they gave linear, elongated shapes a touch of softness, as in a black high-waisted ruched slipdress, or on a long off-white pinafore, worn with a contrasting thick black turtleneck. Jewelry was another seductive touch: Waists were cinched with thin belts featuring round silver buckles, and the angular lines of coats and sharp-cut blazers were decorated with bold jewel-like silver buttons. Along the same subtly imaginative lines, the hem of a slender black overcoat and the scalloped edges of a ruched white blouse were laser-cut into feminine broderie anglaise motifs. A skirt suit was padded and stitched with an abstract floral motif, while an ensemble in soft pink satin had a luscious, almost liquid finish.Further highlighting the yin-yang subtext of the Meiers’s creative vision, a series of shirtdresses was offered in roomy, precise shapes, crisply cut in an organic banana fiber fabric. “Shirtdresses are important to us, as they are the perfect synthesis of the masculine and the feminine,” they explained.Art references are also paramount at Jil Sander; recently the designers have been fascinated by the Viennese Secession movement, extensively researching the work of Wiener Werkstätte’s artists like Josef Hoffmann, Koloman Moser, and the textile designer Maria Lucia Stadlmayer.
Their aesthetics, which flourished at the juncture of Art Nouveau’s sensuality and Japonisme’s sophisticated restraint, clearly appealed to the Meiers. “We’ve been kind of leaning in a Vienna mood for some time,” said Luke, referring to the Spring show, where the same inspiration was in evidence. For Pre-Fall, Stadlmayer’s graphic patterns were reproduced in their original proportions and colors on sheer organza layers, juxtaposed over sharp-cut silk twill or silk jersey shirts, skirts, and tunics, inducing a slightly kinetic, blurred chromatic effect. “We used the motifs on their authentic scale, because you have permission from the archives in Vienna to reproduce them only in the exact proportions and colors she intended to use,” they said. “We really cared about keeping the integrity of the design; we didn’t want to appropriate them in the wrong way.”
27 November 2019
More evidence that crafts are the lingua franca of the Spring shows—this time from Luke and Lucie Meier at Jil Sander. The husband-and-wife duo explored natural raffia detailing in their new collection, in vivid counterpoint to the sharp tailoring that the house is known for. Minimalism may be at the essence of the brand, but that aesthetic can lean antiseptic and cold. At a moment when consumers are examining their designer purchases more closely than ever, evidence of the hand is not just a point of distinction, it’s a way to exhibit heart and soul. To make a connection.The Meiers were indeed thinking about connections with this show. A pair of prints—one of fish, the other virgins—were designed to represent their Pisces (Lucie) and Virgo (Luke) signs: They’re astrological opposites. The notion of opposites was another organizing principle. They liked the look of a tailored two-button jacket over a silk slip dress or a draped jersey dress in a new-for-them marble print, and they also paired long silk tunics embroidered with sequins in the shapes of birds over narrow trousers: structure andflou; soft and hard. It can be difficult to wrestle the stiffness out of the Sander legacy, so these were meaningful steps forward for the duo.Backstage they discussed the Viennese Secession movement of the 1900s and the psychedelic movement of the 1960s. Their liveliest print yet, that swirling marble motif, took cues from both eras. The way forward for the Meiers is to put the blinders on to outside influences (the #oldCeline-Loewe spectrum that they travel on is crowded) and to zero in on what really matters (at 60 looks the show was quite a few looks too long). First and foremost they should follow the colorful creative instinct that saw them step out of their comfort zone.
18 September 2019
The Jil Sander invitation was accompanied by a sachet filled with what looked like large chocolate truffles (chocolate being this reviewer’s Fashion Week sustenance), but were actually “seed bombs.” Once they are watered, whether in a pot or the ground, these hunks of natural bounty will almost immediately begin sprouting. Collections, they sprout too—and sometimes very spontaneously. But with the exacting vision that Luke and Lucie Meier bring to Jil Sander, you get the impression that their modus operandi is not to do things fast but to do them right. After two years of them designing together, we are continuing to see what this entails.In suiting terms, they fine-tuned silhouettes so that they appeared noticeably constructed without appearing heavy or stiff. “It’s nice to build things,” Luke explained. “You don’t want to sacrifice volume in the spring because of weight or because of warmth.” Accordingly, they proposed shirts as strong standalone pieces, then shifted to lighter, looser layers. And it was pleasing to see the expected emphasis on black and ivory give way to an International Klein blue caftan here, a glossy chocolate leather coat there. There were noticeable subtractions (the frequent absence of lapels) balanced by unexpected additions (straps encircling upper arms; a raffia-like crossbody sash worn under a jacket). And there were decadent fringes extending down the sides of knits, often trailing along the ground, which Lucie explained as a display of poetry. Would they remain so long? “We’re going to figure that out,” said Luke, to which Lucie added that they could be cut as needed.It must have taken some out-of-box thinking to arrive at the boxy, color-blocked bags, which were eye-catching but not as instantly desirable as the big bicolor totes. In fact, while watching the footwear alternate between barely-there moccasins and sturdy-soled boots, a thought occurred that the couple had planted many ideas here, aware that some would capture attention while others might go unnoticed. Printed on the backs of certain looks, for example, was a delicate plant clipping enlarged exponentially beyond its actual size. As a symbol of the collection, it signaled the sensitive side of Jil Sander, which is an integral and admirable aspect of the Meiers’ approach. Now imagine if every guest planted their seed bomb.
21 June 2019
Simplicityis a key word for Jil Sander’s Luke and Lucie Meier. Their design relies on clean, essential lines, almost minimal in their purity, but there’s nothing basic in their rather conceptual approach. In their case, simplicity rhymes more withfinessethan withplainness. Having an appreciation for craft and the sophistication that goes into the minute details they favor, their style is tinged with an elevated folksy attitude.For Resort, they injected a touch of playfulness into the mix, to ease their sometimes too rigorous m.o.: “The silhouette is very elongated, very lean,” said Luke. “It follows the body line, but then it breaks with a playful gesture, like tying something around the waist, be it a belt, a sweater, or a leather waist bag. Trying to convey a sense of lightness and movement.”Cases in point were a striped poplin shirtdress with a matching masculine shirt casually tied around the waist, and an obi-inspired belt draped around a white ottoman cotton canvas chemise, worn over a handmade raffia-crocheted skirt. Mitigating further the elegant severity inherent to the designers’ approach, oversize proportions were reduced and softened, as in a white apron-sundress tightly smocked, its hem ending in a crisp, graceful flounce. Or else shoulders were cut rounded and feminine, as in a black cotton trapeze blouse paired with a matching ankle-grazing asymmetrical skirt; or again, in a white linen A-line midi dress, where the shoulder line had a neat lightness, precise and softly sculptural.Even tailoring, one of the brand’s strong points, was rendered with a softer edge. “We like tailoring because it’s handmade,” said Luke. “It’s not an industrial product. For us, elegance comes down to an appreciation for the care and refinement that goes into things well made.” This is why craft and handwork give their collections a modern folksy feel. Tie-dye Shibori techniques were used as decorative elements on a loose shirt-skirt ensemble, like red abstract poppies blooming on a tobacco raw-silk-canvas field. Elsewhere, white tie-dye motifs lit up an indigo blue cotton blouse. Along the same lines, flowery raffia crochet patches were stitched on a long black plissé skirt with crisp striped inserts. Worn with a tailored blazer and a white sculpted blouse in ottoman cotton canvas, it looked polished and cool.
Underlining the imaginative feel, looks were completed with playful accessories: Japanese-inspired chunky wooden platforms with braided laces; flat sandals trailing raffia fringed tassels; flower-shaped sculptural earrings; and pearl pendants. Extra-large straw shopping bags evoked a crescent moon, while a bohemian fringy shoulder bag concealed a rigid boxy purse on the inside. They revealed a poetic, quirky side of the designers’ aesthetic. Breaking free from control can open up clever new perspectives.
22 May 2019
Anyone eager for lessons in the dress-over-pants look—the “It” silhouette of 2019—should make a study of Lucie and Luke Meier’s latest Jil Sander collection. The Meiers were thinking about the interplay of masculine and feminine for Fall, and in many cases tonight they combined the two modalities in one look: slipping a crisp white shirtdress over full-legged black trousers; a leather smock on top of leather pants, the pants in a slightly deeper shade of yellow than the smock; or a willowy knit tunic above matching knit leggings with zips inside the ankles. Layering like this has looked cumbersome and unwieldy on other runways this season, but with their shared appreciation for simplicity, the Meiers made a case for the ease of this silhouette: It’s feminine but with a sturdy foundation.Jil Sander the brand was built on tailoring. The Meiers have paid the subject due attention since arriving in 2017. There was certainly no shortage of jackets in this 60-look collection, and sturdy is the operative word for the ones in raw-edged felted wool. A little loosening up wouldn’t have gone amiss; the Meiers could stand to undo another proverbial button or two. The designers were at their best here when they were thinking along sensual, relaxed lines. They seemed to intuit this with the hand-drawn prints of herons, sandpipers, and swallows that decorated the bodice of a long dress and the backs of vests and jackets. The show’s hero pieces were a pair of cotton dresses with tea towel stripes decorating cuffs and hems. Unassuming in the most seductive way, they conjured images of the seaside and all the blissful associations that come with it. More of this kind of thing next Spring. The dyed-in-the-wool city girl can simply throw one on over her favorite Jil trousers.
20 February 2019
“We were really into the idea of looking at tailoring,” said Lucie Meier immediately before this show. “How to wear tailoring today. We wanted to sharpen up the silhouette and then play with it.”“Yes, because we really imagine our guy,” interjected Luke Meier, “which I guess is a little bit autobiographical to me and Lucie, as being someone who knows the codes and details of tailoring. But the evolution became, ‘How does it become cool today? How do you want to wear it?’ And the answer is with a certain attitude. You don’t want to have something stiff and constricting.”Mrs. and Mr. Meier are clearly serious thinkers. The collections they are producing at Jil Sander reflect that. They are precise, too. Today’s menswear collection was hand-sanitizer sterile in the long, lean purity of the silhouette—buttoned up at the neck, double-coated, and flowing in the skirt, and chunkily vulcanized at the foot—and contained some indubitably lovely pieces. There was a blue overcoat that seemed the Socratic ideal of its form. An all-teal look in Japanese fabrics and the mélange matching pant and shirt looks with action shoulders were nice, too.There were slightly dubious asides, like the narrow, 40-ish-centimeter-long strapped leather carry bags that couldn’t be ideal for toting much beyond drumsticks. The idea, originally used for mountain climbers looking to sling their down jackets like a backpack on a warm morning, of attaching straps to the inside of overcoats so they could be worn over one shoulder worked only until one of the coats slipped off its strap and hung lumpily off its wearer’s hip. There was a whole inside out section at the end, with typeset label logos, that has been done many times before but was pleasant enough here. Overlook the floating patched-silk cloaks: runway gesture.That silhouette though was sometimes surgical in its very vertical sharpness: a little old Jil and a little old Prada too, but fresh for now. This iteration of Sander lacks warmth—although perhaps ’twas ever thus—but it is nonetheless generating an abstracted heat.
18 January 2019
Since their appointment as Jil Sander’s creative directors in 2017, Luke and Lucie Meier have worked to refresh the house’s codes, to which they appear to be naturally aligned, consistently infusing them with their own vision. And it seems right to say that so far they’ve been rather successful at polishing a blend of sensitive, thoughtful minimalism, where dry conceptualism is banned in favor of a certain rigorous yet sensuous simplicity and of a subtle, luxurious restraint.Pre-Fall was in keeping with the rules of style explored in the Spring show. “We really wanted to work into simplicity,” said Lucie. “Working around the form and then working deeper into this form in a very textured, detailed way.” To give geometric shapes a compelling twist, they used their technical expertise. “We started from pure, essential forms,” added Luke. “A little off the body, sculptural, square, and then from there we worked into the technique, mixing fabrics and textures, adding interesting details, but also keeping a lot of rawness; for example, we used raw canvas and then we added broderie anglaise on it, giving it a richness while starting from a humble, honest material.”Stripping things away, they arrived at a very pure silhouette and then played on defining surfaces and volumes, where textured mixes were assembled via a sophisticated, not-so-simple execution. Built-in decorative details became an integral part of the garments’ construction; patches and intarsias of different wools and canvas in mainly neutral shades were artfully stitched together, reconfiguring graphic, gently oversize volumes. “They’re not oversize really,” said Lucie. “They’re generous, friendly volumes; it’s all about comfort, the softness around the body. There are no hard edges.” And while shapes were kept precise and sharp, they exuded the tactile, cozy feel of malleable double wools, lightly padded silks, and spongy, natural felts.A touch of folksiness added warmth to the sculptural, elevated flair of the collection, as in a series of square-shaped jackets and cabans, cut and sewn out of striped wool blankets. The same tactile, quiet ease tinged a sporty duvet, padded and sculptural yet light and round, which could be worn off the shoulders backpack-style, hanging on built-in straps; the designers call it the Gallery Coat.
The Meiers are intelligent designers, mindful of what’s going on in the world; they put their work in a wider context, and a conversation with them always entails considerations of the current cultural climate. They definitely try to give a deeper meaning to what they’re doing. “If you think about the whole scope of it,” reasoned Luke, “it’s important that in fashion, quality is back, really at the forefront, because we shouldn’t be so wasteful; we should make things that last and feel good and are not disposable.” Lucie chimed in: “And I think that it’s not so bad to create beauty. Beauty is soothing. We care a lot about that.”
26 November 2018
Butterfly bushes and giant leafy plants sprouted from the tiled floor of the old panettone factory that served as the location for today’s Jil Sander show. Designers Luke and Lucie Meier, now in their third ready-to-wear runway season at the label, were thinking about nature and order and where they rub up against each other for Spring. (Alan Weisman’s 2007 bookThe World Without Usis great on this subject.) It’s an apt area of examination for the duo, who inherited a sartorially oriented brand in a fashion moment that’s casual in the extreme. What should a pantsuit look like in 2019?Rather than nail something definitive, the designers opted for experimentation. Their new Jil Sander pantsuits took their cues from uniforms, with influences from the military, the artist’s studio, and sport. There was rarely anything so simple or straightforward as a three-button blazer. Instead, the Meiers played with Dickies-style work shirts or art smocks, in fabrics with a sturdy stiffness. In head-to-toe monochrome, these pantsuits and skirtsuits were chic enough but with a certain aloofness that uniforms tend to imply. Nature entered the picture in the form of several blue garment-dyed silks that the Meiers cut into a zip-front jacket, a long windbreaker, and pull-on pants. These had a looseness and freedom, and they warmed up this section of the show. Elsewhere, the checked and ribbed knit separates also resonated: They possessed a sensual ease in tune with the way women are dressing now.The Meiers came out for their bows wearing white T-shirts, black pants, and sneakers—in uniform. Luke said he identified the functionality of uniforms with the act of “getting good at something.” That makes sense. The Meiers are committed minimalists and assured technicians; they’re a good fit for Jil. But it might still take really getting in touch with nature to revitalize this label.
19 September 2018
Lucie and Luke Meier are the latest designers looking to what seems to be the theme of the season. As Lucie explained: “We were thinking of the core and the base of Jil Sander, which is obviously the white shirt and the suit. It’s the uniform. So we were working with this concept of uniform and trying to play with it.”Half-obscured under a voluminous gray-and-cream check mesh-knit cardigan in the Sander showroom was a version of that emblematic starting point: a slim-cut, narrow-shouldered, high-revered, notch-lapeled, tailored black jacket over a plain white shirt. Under it was one of several skorts in this collection. From the waist up, and minus the knit, it was a touching flashback.The Meiers moved on by alighting upon several uniform subsets while maintaining a consistently wide and substantial silhouette heaped with layering. A “monastic” (as Lucie rightly put it) black cashmere shirt and pant uniform was topped with a sailor collar. High-neck white shirting featured gun flaps, and there were fishermen’s hats. A very fine section of garment-dyed, washed-khaki polyamide/urethane collarless parkas, bombers, pullover shirts, and shorts took their starting point from military pilot jumpsuits. The checks, said Luke, were from the idea of team sports. Less uniform-y but interestingly made and compellingly colored were the long knit intarsia sweaters in irregular patches of mohair, cotton, and wool. The sneakers and boots were heavy and broad-soled to anchor the bigness of the silhouettes, but the attractive backpacks were as light as you like, cut in the same poly-blend as the parkas.As last season, there was mood music with this collection via a film of some models wearing it in some rather sadly drab north-of-Milan hinterland. This collection, the military section especially, featured some interesting takes on uniform well worth volunteering for.
22 June 2018
Luke and Lucie Meier look at the big picture, putting their work into a wider context; the vision for Jil Sander they’re bringing about is definitely intelligent and considerate. It’s also infused with a kind of forceful sensitivity, a creative yin-yang dynamic that feels very personal. Being a couple, they live and work together, so even if the zeitgeist cannot be left outside the front door, taking refuge in daily life is not such a bad option. “Of course, we always think about the future and where the world is going,” explained Luke. “It’s an issue that confronts us every day; it won’t go away anytime soon. But even if we’re going into a more radical future with more radical changes ahead, there will still be ideals and things that make us very human, like the feeling of intimacy and the need for comfort, or enjoying our daily rituals, or loving little objects that bring us back into real experiences.”The Meiers’ take on daily life’s motifs is utterly sophisticated; in their hands even the unassuming plastic shopping bag used for errands at the Saturday farmers’ market becomes an adorable object of desire, knitted in nylon in mouthwatering sherbet colors and delicately embroidered with tiny beads. Other mundane objects, like striped mattresses, kitchen tiles, and Vichy tablecloths, received the same ultra-polished treatment, stripped bare of any literal reference and translated into linear, beautifully layered elastic tunics and tops or fluid shirting ensembles and pajama suits, nodding to the feeling of intimacy and ease they wanted to celebrate.Tailoring, always a strong point at Jil Sander, was given a soft edge and a sense of functional purpose; even when close to the body, shapes were kept light and nonrestrictive, cut loose with sharp precision. An artisanal finish in the choice of textures gave substance to the sensuous flair of shell overcoats, loose egg-shaped jackets or blazers with detachable bibs, and feminine corsets zippered on the inside. “Luxury has to do with feeling good in your clothes and in your personality,” said Lucie. “It’s also about empowerment, which only comes through confidence and ease.”
23 May 2018
Anti-fascist protests in the center of Milan brought traffic to a standstill late this afternoon. With Italy’s national elections looming, demonstrators were rallying against a rising tide of xenophobia. The events made Lucie and Luke Meier’s statement backstage more poignant: “It’s a collection about the future, but in a human, warm, comforting way. When you read the news, it sounds like everything is going downhill, and it’s going to be terrible,” said Lucie. “We want to make ourselves feel good about the future and think about it in a positive way.”To do so, the Meiers, now in their second runway season at Jil Sander, chose what they considered comforting fabrics and enveloping silhouettes. The first look to walk down the expansive runway was a strictly tailored jacket made from thick-gauge wool encased in organza. Luke insisted that it was remarkably light. Other soft materials followed: a blue-and-white floral downy fleece was cut into a double-face cocoon coat, and many of the models—both female and male—either carried duvets or wore them draped around the shoulders or cinched around the waist. The concept was clear, but it seems unlikely to catch on in real life. Wrapped around the shoulders, those duvets would actually be quite restrictive. A more compelling idea were the gracefully askew ribbed knit sweaters and skirts, and sweat-suiting tops and bottoms. In red or navy, the ribbed knits especially had a chic sense of ease that will make them attractive to a lot of women.The Jil Sander references were oblique. The Meiers seem inclined to embellish the minimalistic tailoring she was known for: with bicep-cinching armbands that served no obvious purpose, or with schoolgirl sailor collars for women and shoulder-spanning spread collars for men. These weren’t necessarily offensive, but they weren’t all that compelling either.The Meiers’ instincts are right: Most of us are craving succor and communion. A first step going forward would be to find a more intimate setting for their show. Getting up close to the clothes might make it easier to make that connection they were talking about.
24 February 2018
As the latest stewards in the up-and-down history of Jil Sander, Lucie and Luke Meier presented a carefully curated debut menswear collection. Downstairs, a handheld film showed five white-clad figures wandering single file around the outskirts of Milan’s Porta Nuova. Upstairs, past a room of lookbook shots, were the clothes those ghostly commuters were walking in. Luke categorized this group of looks as garments imagined for “space travel in a pretechnological way.” More broadly, he added, their plan at Jil Sander is to express “a modern new idea about menswear without it looking over-technical.” Added Lucie: “We didn’t want to use too much hardware; it was about the softness and the human touch in the pieces.”Organic technical? Vintage futuristic? Emblematic of what the Meiers wanted to evoke were a long padded jacket in a creamy, vellum-y treated cotton that came with a matching shoulder-slung “space blanket,” and an aluminium-buttoned high mac with strips of bonded silver leather in the lining, worn over a white cashmere shirt and vest. Red topstitching on a treated organza jacket (lovely to the touch) and white stitching on a navy wool equivalent revealed an interesting rhomboid pocket shape. There were fur hand warmers and a detachable down hood and chest warmer. Black leather boots and white sneaker equivalents featured a cutaway double-layer, zig-zag upper formidably meshed by lacing. A diagonal weave green overcoat, almost corded, was unassumingly beautiful.Jil Sander menswear has liftoff. Let’s see where it lands.
18 January 2018
Luke and Lucie Meier’s design approach at Jil Sander is nothing less than considerate; they look at the big picture, the zeitgeist is their mood board. Even the fastening of a button or the placement of a hook can be the subject of a meaningful conversation. That’s quite a sensible and intelligent attitude, since ideas and perspective matter tremendously today, given the state of the world.“We were thinking about the future: where humanity is kind of going, where the planet is going. There are lots of heavy things going on, so negative,” reflected Luke during a Pre-Fall appointment in the Milan showroom. “We were trying to be positive, though, not giving in to the doom and gloom of this quite dark period. Sometimes, we even think that it’d be great to publish a newspaper which only reports about good news! A sort of an antidote to all the bad which is happening around us.” Lucie chimed in: ”We wanted softness, no hard edges, garments hugging the body in a gentle way; something emotional, soulful, comforting. Cocooning, as if the garment and the body became one. The idea of wrapping, with a cozy cardigan feel. Protection and airiness.”Tailoring is one of the house’s foundations, its precision and sharpness being paramount for the label’s trademark silhouette, radical and advanced, yet stylish. The designers tapped into this progressive and rigorous aesthetic, yet they considerably smoothed shapes and volumes, giving roundness and softness a pride of place in the collection. To achieve a feel of controlled comfort and ease, dry menswear fabrics were made stretchy and malleable; silhouettes were elongated as if extended at the extremes: very high necklines, extra-long trousers. Tailoring techniques included wrapping, twisting, and playing with asymmetries and askew, angular cuttings. Soft, undulating effects graced the fastenings of jackets cut close to the body, creating geometric lateral ripples; classic white shirts in crisp poplin boasted diagonal, wavy double volants on one side, which could be buttoned according to the wearer’s whim. “It’s a way of breaking the sharpness; a play on asymmetry makes things more alive with movement, it’s feminine but still controlled,” explained Lucie.High, pointy collars put a sculptural focus on the neckline; movable and adjustable corsets were padded and bendable, adding to the sense of protection.
This flair for graceful, feminine armor was highlighted by unexpected bursts of bright color for skirts and tops in floral jacquards, which nicely contrasted with severe shades of ink black, deep navy blue, off-white, and camel: ”Color is like a surprise,” mused Lucie. ”Something which feels very hopeful.”
11 December 2017
Lucie and Luke Meier made their Jil Sander runway debut outdoors during sunset at a soon-to-open mall at the foot of Milan’s new Zaha Hadid–designed tower. It was a break from the past—the string of creative directors that preceded them all showed at the company’s headquarters—and a display of confidence. Though this is the first time they’ve worked together, the Meiers have reason to feel bold; they arrived at Sander with impressive résumés. Lucie’s most recent gig was Dior opposite Serge Ruffieux, a much bigger stage than this one, and Luke cofounded the men’s label OAMC after working for nearly a decade at Supreme, the streetwear brand whose phenomenal success is the envy of all of fashion.That boldness aside, Sander’s legacy is a daunting one to wrangle with. To start with, Sander left the brand she founded in 2000, and that’s a lifetime in fashion. Then there’s the fact, which is related, that the German designer was a cool minimalist, known for the deft way she tailored a suit, and that’s just not where fashion is at in 2017, despite the best efforts of some to resurrect the ’90s. A faithful reimagining of Sander’s oeuvre could snap the industry out of its current taste for eccentric quirk, or it could risk looking irrelevant.The Meiers did a deep study of the designer’s work and came to the conclusion that we misremember Sander. “A lot of the time, the first impression of her is cold, sparse, and hard,” Luke said. “What she did,” Lucie added, “was also feminine, light, and sensual; that was the approach for us.” So, yes, there were suits here and they were Jil Sander correct, with narrowed shoulders and sharp creases on the arms and body, plus the occasional sliced seam to amplify visual interest. And the designers devoted a fair bit of attention to the Sander-signature white shirt, de-crisping it with soft puffed sleeves and generous volumes, or elongating it into shirtdresses of ascetic proportions. The surprise was in the collection’s craftiness. On the continuum of less to more convincing were color-blocked sweater dresses in an openwork stitch; macramé accents under coats, circling waistbands, and draped on top of shirts; and delicately but generously smocked ethereal white dresses.In the end, the expansive show venue didn’t work in the Meiers’ favor; it’s hard to fill such a grand space with emotion, even with 60 looks, and the intimacies that the designers seem to favor are better appreciated at close range. That said, there was promise here.
23 September 2017
Lucie and Luke Meier made their Jil Sander runway debut outdoors during sunset at a soon-to-open mall at the foot of Milan’s new Zaha Hadid–designed tower. It was a break from the past—the string of creative directors that preceded them all showed at the company’s headquarters—and a display of confidence. Though this is the first time they’ve worked together, the Meiers have reason to feel bold; they arrived at Sander with impressive résumés. Lucie’s most recent gig was Dior opposite Serge Ruffieux, a much bigger stage than this one, and Luke cofounded the men’s label OAMC after working for nearly a decade at Supreme, the streetwear brand whose phenomenal success is the envy of all of fashion.That boldness aside, Sander’s legacy is a daunting one to wrangle with. To start with, Sander left the brand she founded in 2000, and that’s a lifetime in fashion. Then there’s the fact, which is related, that the German designer was a cool minimalist, known for the deft way she tailored a suit, and that’s just not where fashion is at in 2017, despite the best efforts of some to resurrect the ’90s. A faithful reimagining of Sander’s oeuvre could snap the industry out of its current taste for eccentric quirk, or it could risk looking irrelevant.The Meiers did a deep study of the designer’s work and came to the conclusion that we misremember Sander. “A lot of the time, the first impression of her is cold, sparse, and hard,” Luke said. “What she did,” Lucie added, “was also feminine, light, and sensual; that was the approach for us.” So, yes, there were suits here and they were Jil Sander correct, with narrowed shoulders and sharp creases on the arms and body, plus the occasional sliced seam to amplify visual interest. And the designers devoted a fair bit of attention to the Sander-signature white shirt, de-crisping it with soft puffed sleeves and generous volumes, or elongating it into shirtdresses of ascetic proportions. The surprise was in the collection’s craftiness. On the continuum of less to more convincing were color-blocked sweater dresses in an openwork stitch; macramé accents under coats, circling waistbands, and draped on top of shirts; and delicately but generously smocked ethereal white dresses.In the end, the expansive show venue didn’t work in the Meiers’ favor; it’s hard to fill such a grand space with emotion, even with 60 looks, and the intimacies that the designers seem to favor are better appreciated at close range. That said, there was promise here.
29 November 2017
If a Hollywood film producer had the urge to finance a blockbuster based on fashion’s current musical chairs moment, the casting auditions would certainly last for months. Designers applying for the starring roles would be in the zillions. Some of the newest to join the revolving door bandwagon are Luke and Lucie Meier, a husband-and-wife duo who have just been appointed Jil Sander’s creative directors. Between the two of them, they’ve amassed fashion experience so extensive, it runs the spectrum from Dior Haute Couture to Supreme.Lucie Meier, who is Swiss, has worked at Louis Vuitton under Marc Jacobs, at Balenciaga under Nicolas Ghesquière, and at Dior under Raf Simons; the list sounds like a sort of fashion Ivy League. To top it off, she stepped in at Dior’s helm for a few seasons after Simons’s departure, alongside Serge Ruffieux (who has since landed at Carven). Luke Meier is Canadian and has a business and finance background, which he traded for a position as head designer of Supreme in New York. After eight years, he decamped and founded his own menswear line, OAMC, which is shown in Paris. Presumably, the Meiers have no problem finding common ground at the dinner table.Resort is their first Jil Sander collection; the official runway debut will be in September. Even if the artists weren’t present in the showroom, the collection looked like a promising blend. It already bears their marks—a combination of purity, grace, and thoughtful precision (Lucie) and fast-paced, advanced cool (Luke).Jil Sander’s style has often been associated with stark minimalism—which wasn’t always the case when the house founder herself was still in the picture. One of the problems for many of the designers who have assumed her mantle has been the emphasis put on rigid, cerebral construction, which was just one of Sander’s hallmarks. The Meiers seem to have a subtler, more nuanced understanding; it apparently worked for both women’s and men’s lines, which were presented together.Ground zero for the Meiers was the crisp white shirt, taken as a sort of clean foundation. It was the connecting point of the masculine-feminine play between the two lines, where the same item was reworked and repeated in slightly different versions. The silhouette was precise, yet lighter, smoothed by an artsy vibe where folk volumes and details were reduced to archetypal references. A pervasive feminine flair ran throughout the collection.
Shiny plastic paillettes cascaded in rivulets from the open sides of a severe, elegant black coat. It was a decorative gesture with an almost couture-like flourish, balanced with relaxed cool.
22 June 2017
Security and its flip side, protection, have been two of the most persistent topics among this season’s running themes. Designers either want to swaddle us in knits and bundle us up in big coats, or they’re keen to cut strong, serious suits. Given the state of the world, these seem like natural instincts, and they seem to apply to Rodolfo Paglialunga and his latest Jil Sander collection. Take his tailoring, for instance, which was voluminous (as is the current vogue) and served to obscure his models’ willowy frames. On jackets both single- and double-breasted, shoulders were exaggerated, and seaming gave the impression of flattened, almost two-dimensional sleeves. Pants were generously proportioned and skirts were softly A-line or tulip-shaped. Quilting, a somewhat surprising trend given its bulkifying properties, turned up here on elastic-waist skirts, a long-sleeved top, and a dress that looked forgiving, if not necessarily flattering. Flannel and satin coats seemed similarly injected with downy air. Among all of his ideas around these themes, the coats were the most convincing: polished yet practical, and a clever, timely adaptation of the omnipresent puffer jacket.Sensuality got somewhat sidelined in this mix. Paglialunga used some of the spangly Lurex fabrics that we’ve seen elsewhere, but rather than nipping and tucking them around the body, he built them up with shoulder pads and extra-wide sleeves or let them droop—a missed opportunity. Inevitably, perhaps, the handful of looks that limned the body had the most appeal: a pair of loosely draped sheaths in an abstract animal stripe, a clingy ribbed knit dress in ivory, and a little black dress gathered at the waist with a metal piercing. A touch more of that subtle kink, while not necessarily in keeping with the Sander codes, could have enlivened this subdued collection, which is widely rumored to be Paglialunga’s last for the label.
25 February 2017
Rodolfo Paglialunga,Jil Sander’s creative director, was on hand during the Pre-Fall presentation. He was calm and chatty, totally unfazed by the swirling rumors about a change of guard at the house, and eager to draw attention to his work on the collection. “I wanted to soften the shapes, volumes are loose, embracing the body instead of defining the silhouette in an obvious way,” he explained.Highlighted by a strict palette of white and black, with occasional flashes of gray, rust, and bordeaux, the collection’s lines were stark. “Sometimes the term ‘minimalism’ is misused,” said Paglialunga. “For me, true minimalism is when shapes are virtually archetypal: the rectangle, the triangle, the square.” Case in point was a voluminous black double cashmere coat cut in a large rectangle, with a detachable scarf that could be adjusted around the body to dramatic effect. Despite the rigorous allure, it looked sumptuous. It also had a whiff of Zoran’s ’90s oversize style, which could also be traced in an ample black overcoat, slightly egg-shaped, with knitted shirt sleeves. Elsewhere, hybrids including a tunic/gilet had an elongated, slim silhouette; worn with a crisp white poplin shirt over slouchy high-waisted pants, it looked modern and chic. A play on geometric cuts was in evidence throughout the lineup, yet Paglialunga was able to give flexibility and suppleness to neat, almost androgynous shapes, working on layering, juxtapositions, and asymmetries.Knitwear added a touch of sensuality, as in a long belted tunic worn with slinky, narrow pants. The house signature masculine tailoring turned up in a series of city coats; a notable example was an oversize overcoat made in a luxurious mix of mohair and wool.
30 January 2017
The Jil Sander men’s Fall collection was presented in the showroom, designed by the in-house studio. No designer with a capital D was in attendance; it was explained that the label was in a sort of transition phase.The lineup referencedIndependent People, a quite arcane ’40s novel written by Halldór Laxness, an Icelandic Nobel Prize–winning author, in which he described, with a kind of socialist realism, the struggle that Icelandic people had to endure against an inhospitable, harsh nature. As a starting point, it had a quite desolate feel.The obvious need of protection from such extreme conditions inspired a collection divided into four themes: Disgregation, Neo-Brutalism, Solid Ground, Zen. Clearly, none of these concepts exuded any particular joyous appeal; they sounded intimidating and glacial, if not a little pretentious. The protective factor was on full display for a lineup where outerwear was of massive proportions. It was raw in feel, gigantic in volume, and dark in the mimetic quality of its colors, mimicking the organic shades of ice, lava, stones, geysers, rocks, and glaciers. Probably, it’d look invisible in an actual Icelandic landscape.Textures were obviously raw, almost harsh; huge straps held together waistcoats that looked like arctic bulletproof armor, layered over coarse-looking knits. A few suits had elongated jackets worn over cropped and slightly flared pants; overcoats were slit on the sides, closed by metallic snaps. When not oversize, shapes were kept severe, with an austere aplomb. Hopefully, the transition will lead toward sunnier shores.
15 January 2017
Rodolfo Paglialunga has been at the helm ofJil Sanderfor two years now. He inherited the house at a time of turbulence, after Sander herself made a brief return followingRaf Simons’sdeparture for Dior. Paglialunga’s approach so far has been to hew, more or less, closely to the minimalist Sander ethos. His work isn’t as exacting as hers was, but let’s just say he hasn’t gone out on a limb.Chalk it up to time passed, but he took some big risks today. They came in the form of exaggerated volume and fabric play. Paglialunga began playing with the former at his Fall show, but here he really took the plunge, accenting all of his tailoring, many of his dresses, and some sweatshirts, too, with enormous shoulder pads. He said he was after a 1940s-by-way-of-the-’80s look. But if these clothes conjure images ofVetementsfor you, they did for most of the audience as well. Demna Gvasalia’s influence can be seen up and down the runways; he surely doesn’t have a copyright on shoulder pads. Perhaps if Paglialunga had shown some of his looks without them—he did say that they’re removable—the appropriation wouldn’t have felt quite so on the nose.As it was, the pleated dresses—while pretty in shades of peach, light blue, and yellow— that formed the other side of the Sander story were rather too reminiscent ofIssey Miyake’sfamousPleats Pleaseline. Sander’s own heritage would seem to be too rich to resort to such imitation. Paglialunga has proved as much with previous collections for the house.
24 September 2016
“I wanted to convey a sense of relaxed lightness,” said designer Rodolfo Paglialunga backstage after Jil Sander’s Spring men’s show. He tried to bring a natural ease to the quite strict house codes, without betraying their substantial legacy. Lines were clean, bordering on the severe, with an almost purist bent. Paglialunga worked around a concept of reduction and restraint, peeling off, as the press notes stated, even the slightest layer of “the superfluous”—a term that, by the way, has never been even remotely associated with Sander’s style.The show was a rendition of classic Sander staples, almost archetypal—boxy workwear-inspired blousons, unstructured cotton suits with controlled volumes, dusters of ample near billowy proportions. It looked pared down and practical, a modular wardrobe for the modern zeitgeist. Fabrics were light yet textured; the color palette spanned from luminous hues—pale blues and grays, delicate greens—to sun-bleached, ombré effects that, as Paglialunga described, gave an almost “foggy” patina to part of the lineup. It was testament to the designer’s sophisticated flair, yet it darkened the summery mood, bringing it down a notch. A well-needed jolt of energy came via a leather blouson in a bright shade of sunny orange. Seeing more of that spirit would’ve been a welcome choice—it wouldn’t have been be considered at all “superfluous.”
18 June 2016
Jil Sanderis a brand with a strong personality and a charged legacy; let’s say that it carries a bit of an “extra baggage” factor. But a good designer loves a good challenge, and creativity is fueled by limitations. “There’s a very clear identity to confront,” says Rodolfo Paglialunga, who took the creative helm in 2014. “You don’t go to a sushi restaurant and ask for roast beef! I had to work around it to find a key for my personal interpretation.” The Resort collection seemed to be a step in that direction; Paglialunga seemed to feel at ease with the house’s codes. What he brought to the table was a soft precision, a kind of clever smoothing of the rigorous standards defined by the label’s founder, the impossibly exacting Frau Sander, who set the bar quite high.This was apparent in the lineup, designed as a flexible wardrobe: “It’s classic in its essence, but very modern in its aesthetic, and with a fresh take,” explained Paglialunga, pointing to a chic military-inspired trench in thick cotton canvas with buttoned slits at the back that he paired with voluminous, slouchy pants. Fabrics, one of the house’s distinctive fortes, took center stage in a beautiful selection of natural fibers. Cotton was given a sensual, satiny finish; silk duchesse was woven with a metallic thread and cut into an elongated crinkled tunic and a simple, elegant T-shirt; leather was papery thin and bonded in cotton. The color palette was almost polar: shell pink, nude, ice, ivory, bone, and caramel, laced with a touch of black. Paglialunga worked around geometric shapes—circles, rectangles, trapezoids, and triangles mixed together in a rhythmic assemblage with a relaxed feel. But the spontaneous vibe was deceptive; at close inspection, the sharpness of cut revealed that Frau Sander’s legacy was still firmly in place.
24 May 2016
Today’sJil Sandershow started off as designer Rodolfo Paglialunga’s most literal interpretation yet of the house founder’s style. The superclean, slightly oversize double-breasted white coat with the high-contrast black buttons and the two-button black pantsuit that came next might’ve walked around the same space 20 or so years ago. They looked great. The dozen or so looks that followed hewed to the same general rules: monochrome, minimal, pure, precise. It felt like a chic retort to the vintage-tinged, overtly embellished, almost ditzy direction that so much of Milan has taken this season. It felt confident.About a third of the way through the show that poise slipped. There’s little doubt that the pressure to situate yourself within the season’s big story is immense. Maximalism is ascendant in 2016. And so Paglialunga, picking up a thread seen elsewhere this week, turned to what his notes described as “artificial surfaces.” There was a silver raincoat glossier than patent and stiffer than glass—well not really, but you get the drift. The metallic pink of a long-sleeved dress didn’t have much give either. And there were shaggy mohair sweaters that were unfavorably compared to Brillo Pads by some attendees.If there’s something that Sander is remembered for beyond her rigorous silhouettes it was her beautiful fabrics. Paglialunga has come to terms with the first part of her legacy, but in this show at least the second part gave him more trouble. One thought for the future is to avoid tech fabrics, which can often feel dry to the touch and leave customers cold, and focus on natural fibers instead. The beauty of simple silk and even cotton is something to consider as Paglialunga begins work on Resort and Spring.
27 February 2016
Rodolfo Paglialunga,Jil Sander’s creative director, is aware that the brand’s legacy is not the easiest one to confront. He refrains from using the usual string of adjectives associated with its style—linear, essential, rigorous, strict. “I think they’re predictable,” he said during the label’s recent presentation. “It’s not just about basics with trite feminine/masculine dialectics, [and it] cannot be reduced to minimalism. It deeply relates to the reality in which we live, which is why it has always been so relevant.” Paglialunga put layering front and center for Pre-Fall, not only as a metaphor for protection from our challenging times, but also as a synonym for flexibility and interpretation. In order to adapt, we have to be malleable yet firm.It can’t be denied that a sense of austerity has always been ingrained in Jil Sander’s lexicon. Still, Paglialunga wanted to address it in his own way. “I’d like to bring a sense of irony into the conversation—to mess things around a bit, bring about a dialogue between order and disorder,” he said. Yet nothing felt haphazard here. On the contrary, the offering of beautifully cut outerwear in thick, hyper-luxe fabrics looked in sync with Ms. Sander’s exacting style, her aristocratic yet practical pedigree firmly in place via the coats’ masculine structure, military influences, and precise execution. Paglialunga’s own personality was at play in the collection’s layered look; he was unrestrained in the use of decorative tailored details. A long double-face cashmere vest paired with extra-long palazzo pants or with high-waisted masculine trousers nicely morphed into a scarf with a simple, elegant gesture, becoming an accessory. Overall, this was a tight, efficient lineup with a most welcome touch of cool.
23 January 2016
Jil Sander’s codes seem apparently simple, rooted in a clear vision of modern values: practicality, precision, quality, exacting standards of execution. Yet deeper complexities have always been layered beneath a surface of such essential, minimal language. All the designers appointed to work on Sander’s challenging legacy have been confronted with a creative oxymoron: trying to capture the essence of a strong vision firmly expressing thezeitgeistbut also an ineffable, elusive sense of timeless flair. Jil Sander has not just been a relevant brand—it has become an actual style. It comes as no surprise that the task of reviving it has been anything but easy: results so far have been mixed.Rodolfo Paglialunga has been at the helm since 2014. A sensible designer, he has worked on the house codes with an elegant hand. For his latest collection he drew inspiration from a military spirit that suited the austere, restrained aesthetic of the brand. Unsurprisingly, outerwear made up the lion’s share. Roomy coats in thick grey wool with high funnel necks had harnesses strapped across the chest; they conveyed a Teutonic grandeur with an underground, slightly perverse undercurrent. They were paired with ultra-slim trousers that enhanced their ample proportions and robust shapes. Nylon MA1 flight jackets were presented in multiple versions, morphing into sweaters or pumped up into voluminous jumpsuits. Panels of grey bonded leather were assembled into rectangular tunics with snap metallic fastening, and sleeveless long vests exposed bare arms, revealing a faint trace of fragility sneaking through an otherwise martial, sturdy, protected interpretation. The military references were handled in a balanced yet slightly twisted, androgynous way; this made for an interesting take on an otherwise predictable theme. The collection had a compact rhythm to it; it was one of Paglialunga's best so far.
16 January 2016
Disciplined. Rigorous. Precise. GoogleJil Sanderand those three adjectives come up more than any others. Fashion, at this moment, is moving in a different direction; Spring is looking decidedly deshabille. What’sRodolfo Paglialunga, installed at Jil Sander one year ago, to do? Remain faithful to the house codes, even as memories of the founder grow fuzzy? Go with the current flow? It’s a conundrum that all designers charged with heading up old labels must face. After a couple runway shows that hewed to Sander’s clean lines, Paglialunga tried option two.An otherwise straightforward two-button blazer was sliced at the shoulder seams, another jacket was cut away in the back, and a third was deconstructed to look more like a pinafore than your standard double-breasted fare, but the tailoring wasn’t so radical as to be alienating. The Sander-classic crisp white shirt got a revamp, too, in crinkly, slinky sky blue silk with an au courant cutout at the midriff. Rounding things out were the sort of slip dresses and wispy bits of silk that have been multiplying on other runways this season. Straps spilled off shoulders, and asymmetric necklines dipped to reveal the upper arm. Cutouts proliferated, not just at the waist, but near the hem of a sheath, or sliced vertically front and back on looser-fitting dresses. Paglialunga is a talented guy, but this collection gave you a twinge of the familiar. It made you miss Sander’s hard edges a bit.
26 September 2015
Sex is not a word you associate with the rarefied world of Jil Sander. Perversion even less. Rodolfo Paglialunga achieved both of those scores in the space of a bunch of looks with his second menswear outing for Jil Sander. To sum it all up, it looked like a wholly new Jil: fast, hard, young."Utility" is the explanation Paglialunga gave, but that's an understatement. The stress of functionality—a multiplication of pockets, name tags, straps everywhere—bordered on the delirious, while the cropped, slim, and compact silhouette gave clear nods in the direction of ska. But it was the materials that really got the imagination going—toward all the dark places, that is. Parachute nylon was used prominently on narrow parkas and trousers, and so was a stiff coated canvas that looked like something taken from a truck—the anorak was a standout. It resembled the kind of stuff worn in heavy-duty sex clubs. This is not meant in any way as a negative remark: The electric frisson of the inappropriate injected new energy into the collection, which in fact was welcomed by a roar of applause. The dark palette and the protective forms were hardly summery, but that's not really a problem. And if it all looked a bit repetitive, well, repetition is a Jil Sander code. So, bravo Rudi!
20 June 2015
Frédéric Sanchez's soundtrack—a blurry, impressionistic, almost atonal mesh of Nico's and Chet Baker's versions of "My Funny Valentine"—suggested chaos. But the set was a precisely ordered group of colored pillars, like a geometric Stonehenge. Rodolfo Paglialunga imagined his new collection for Jil Sander forming somewhere between the chaos and the precision. The designer would pluck order from disorder.It's all any artist tries to do, but Paglialunga's challenge was a little more pointy, given the patchiness of his efforts to date. Still, he made huge strides with this collection. It won't set Planet Fashion alight, but it registered as wearable, real-world, and properly proportioned. Credit the designer's precision for that coup. Long coats and matching pants made a new kind of elegantly elongated suit. A bone-toned leather coat was a standout. The lines that traced a navy blue coat suggested something military, the most precise association of all. And even when Paglialunga started to mess with precision, he didn't lose that line; it simply went diagonal. Shaved black mink was diagonally pieced for a coat. Dark green pony got the same treatment in a skirt.Coatdresses were shadow-striped or crisscrossed with tape, always maximizing the line. You could follow the footwear for a subtext. One look featured correspondents paired with a pencil skirt and a full-sleeved knit top. Joan Crawford? That, at least, underscored Paglialunga's disdain when he dismissed the ongoing debate about the dialogue between feminine and masculine in Jil Sander's women's collection as "banal." If he could silence that debate, he'd definitely be able to put his own thumbprint on the label. So he showed a lovely, simple slipdress, and he closed the show with Hedvig Palm in a blush-toned coat that was forceful in line but indubitably womanly. Paglialunga is finding his feet.
28 February 2015
Rodolfo Paglialunga's menswear debut for Jil Sander was less jarring than his first women's show back in September, but he was still absorbed by tricky volumes below the waist. Here it was oversize trousers with a big inverted pleat. "Elegant masculinity" was Paglialunga's stated aim, and maybe those trousers only looked odd because we've grown accustomed to more linear silhouettes. Once the designer matched them to the oversize coats he also showed, a pleasing ’40s synchronicity asserted itself. You could picture a contemporary Humphrey Bogart type.At this stage in the Sander game, we scarcely need to refer back to the label's namesake as a benchmark. Paglialunga should stand or fall on his own merits, not be dogged by comparisons. You could see him working on a wardrobe here, attempting a meld of the fashionable and the functional. The trick for any designer is to sustain interest in such a challenge. In this collection, Paglialunga's color palette showed promise, but it was the coats that won the day for him.
17 January 2015
Oh, God! "The coalescence of genders." Show-note hell strikes again. And all in the name of welcoming a new rider on the Jil Sander roundabout. Shame he couldn't stay on the horse.Rodolfo Paglialunga made such a pleasant splash at Vionnet some seasons ago—enough that his appointment at Jil Sander, erstwhile temple of discipline and rigor in contemporary fashion, caused at least one head to scratch. Maybe that's why he was so insistent that a deep plunge into the archives had shaped this collection. But if it was precision that defined Jil Sander's work, that was exactly what was missing here. There were fit issues throughout. Clunk was probably the best word for the drop-crotch culottes with the out-of-reach pockets. Same with the apron/skirt wrapped over whatever was underneath it, meaning that there was odd bunching when what was underneath had an elasticized waistband.Regarding that gender thing: The collection's muse was Annemarie Schwarzenbach, androgyne, addict, and obsession for the demimonde of the 1920s and '30s. She's also a perennial fashion favorite, most recently with Paula Gerbase of the cult 1205 label. Yes, there was a solid through-line to Sander's own work, but it felt like a seam that has been too thoroughly mined to merit such a literal revisit. And, given the most fleeting acquaintance with Paglialunga's own work, it didn't feel wholly natural. But he is clearly a local hero—the crowd cheered wildly. And the good news is this: The only way is up.
20 September 2014
The spokesperson for the Jil Sander team was careful to point out that the salient detail of the label's Resort collection wasnota bow. It was aknot.The distinction was worthwhile. While Japanese cotton or technical duchesse was tugged into a little ball at the front, it was released in the back to create swinging, sculpted shapes. That relaxed play with volume characterized the clothes, whether in the cinching of coats and dresses, the little flurry of ruffles on the front of a coatdress, the pajama-like languor of the pantsuits, or the trapeze silhouettes. The monochrome palette—white, black, and rust predominated—was a Sander signature, to which a print inspired by the work of artist Raymond Hains added some necessary visual zap. But given that this was the last time at the rodeo for the team before they welcome yet another creative director into the fold, they did a pretty good job of upholding the core values of the brand. They have kindly set the stage for a seamless transition.
24 June 2014
To mark their last collection before the ascension of new creative director Rodolfo Paglialunga, the Jil Sander team went back to the well for inspiration. The clothes had the linear clarity of the earliest Sander menswear: high-closing three-button jackets with tiny lapels; suits and shirts in top-to-toe monochrome or print; and crisp, dry fabrics. But the look back didn't feel retro. Instead it was a reminder of what originally made the label great, possibly because enough time has passed that it appeared newish again."Movement and vibration" were the totems of the collection. A print abstracted the gestures made by an orchestral conductor. (The team used it in a complete ensemble: shirt, shorts, and coat.) A texture aimed to duplicate the vibrations of music underwater. There was movement in the controlled athleticism of the clothes—the body-hugging nylon, elastic waistbands, zips, and drawstrings. Also in the way larger volumes were brought to bear. Oversize trousers were cinched in by a wide belt, and a very appealing coat was fitted in the front and then bloomed into a sack back.Truth to tell, the Sander man was always a rather bloodless proposition, the kind of creature who might actually wear ankle socks with sandals because that was just plain old him, not because he was a dedicated follower of the current trends. But this collection suggested that elegance may be ample recompense for anemia.
22 June 2014
Welcome back, "design team." You have to feel a twinge of sympathy for the anonymous toilers at fashion's coal face, bearing the Jil Sander standard into an uncertain future. At least when there's an actual human being to take a bow at show's end, they can feel that their efforts aren't being entirely sublimated by the need to preserve continuity without promoting personality. What a strange state of affairs, especially when the name on the label has been such a distinctive, influential,un-anonymous force in fashion through the years of her tenure at her brand. And it continued to be so when Raf Simons was in charge.So where—or to whom, or to what—does the "design team" owe allegiance now? The press notes (which at least acknowledged their existence) asserted their commitment to "restating the fundamental codes" of the label. That may have been why there was such analt-Jil vibe about the show. Felted fabrics shaded with the merest suggestion of green or pink were scissored into the neutral, androgynous suits that her original fans craved.In jersey, it could almost have been a new kind of track suit, with shoes—a flat platform, spiced up with colored python—to juice the impression. The cocooning comfort of the coats was on trend. And yet the dominant piece in the show might have been the sleeveless shift, bias-cut, gathered, and wrapped at the waist. It stood out because every time it came around, it was in an actual color instead of a bland hint at same. And that meant it underscored the repetitive element. Cultural shaman Brian Eno once declaimed that repetition of a thing changes it. The Jil Sander show refuted that claim. But let's not blame the "design team." They were just doing their jobs.
21 February 2014
It wasn't hard to imagine the challenge the Jil Sander team faced in creating the collection that necessity demanded they offer today. Shorn of their emblematic figurehead and her show-defining stylist, they presented clothes that were, at best, a stop-gap before Jil's successor takes up the cudgels on a fashion placement that must surely be less gratifying with every warp in the label's continuing devolution.The press notes were a minor masterwork of positive spin, promising "subtle electricity" and "tailoring applied to every aspect of the design of the wardrobe." The head spun with images of bespoke undies. No such luck. In actuality, the studio delivered a smartly serviceable collection of suits, knits, and outerwear that encapsulated the ethos of the label. There was a nod to the appetite for outsize that has already established itself as a trend in Milan (even more appealing in the Sander fabrics), and the "subtle electricity" made its presence felt in the shiny disco pants at show's end.But there was an intriguing question niggling after the show. How different would the audience's response have been if this were a "Jil" show? This was, after all, her team. The only difference is that they were working without her direction. And if she'd been there, directing backstage? Well, who's to know. But let's face it, fashion is all about those backroom boys and girls.
10 January 2014
"The powerful beauty of random assemblage" was the claim made by the show notes. "Elegant, effortless, sophisticated"—Jil Sander's own summation of her collection was scarcely more enlightening. Though "effortlessness" may actually have been pretty close to the mark. From the first—cropped white pants, cropped navy top and jacket—to the last—a black and white feathered skirt with an artful pinafore top—the outfits Sander showed today had a winning ease, a freshness that belied the designer's rep as the mistress of the fiercely pushed envelope. OK, feathers aren't exactly jersey sweats, but the designer used the pinafore effect a few times in the show and it ultimately conveyed the casual decorum of a towel draped around shoulders in a gym situation. Sporty? Well, that also played into the bared midriffs and shorts that recurred throughout. Never mind the mesh.Sander always cut like a dream, and the jackets here that dipped in front and eased up aerodynamically in the back captured that knack. They countered her tendency to err on the side of the clinical. And so did some fractured figurative prints inspired, the show notes insisted, by the work of Arte Povera master Alighiero Boetti. They were as colorfully animated as any element Sander has ever used in a collection. They also had a perversely pleasing taint of irony. Arte Povera? Jil Sander? Mutually exclusive equations, until today.
20 September 2013
"I'm not a print queen," Jil Sander announced after her show today, "but I just have the feeling to extend things." She was referring to the mixed-up, mumbled-up graphic that injected a slice of chaos into the fiercely controlled collection she'd just presented. Controlled, in fact, to the point of clinical, it was one of those moments when one could have wished to be inside the skull of the designer while she was composing her vision of the contemporary male, if only to see exactly what it was that she herself saw.The soundtrack—Marianne Faithfull and Jimmy Somerville—suggested an eighties context. The primarily monochrome black and white palette—interrupted by orange as a flecked pattern, as a piped detail, or as a solid slab of color—compounded that impression with a New Wave graphicism. An industrial eighties feel also molded bonded-leather pieces, shiny and strange.To view the presentation as an expression of the tricky standoff between chaos and control might actually have given it more weight than the designer herself ever intended, even if there were some distressed plaids that supported the notion. And, dissected with a gimlet glare, the collection actually did dissolve into some splendid jackets and coats. But as an overall statement, Sander's man was more mad science than flesh and blood.
21 June 2013
The set was special: a metallic polyhedron carved into the floor. Jil said it was supposed to represent the cut of a diamond, something rare and precious. Toward the end of her show, a coat emerged, bifurcated, its top half coated in luxuriant black fur. It was immediately followed by a handful of sober wool pieces decorated with a strip of gold foil.Diamonds, fur, gold…emblems of luxury. Maybe more. "You buy gold when you don't trust the future," Sander said backstage. "But we're optimists. We want to believe." One thing that was quite clear here was Sander's conviction that she still has plenty to say in fashion. Yet she speaks almost too quietly.The serenity of today's presentation was unimpeachable. There was a particular skirt proportion, flaring just below the knee, that was convincingly, timelessly elegant. Jackets were elongated, slightly suppressed at the waist. Coats were mannish, reassuringly oversize. Buckled shoes with a big heel had a solid Puritan quality. All of that added up to an eminently sensible antidote to whatever is happening anywhere else in fashion.Such is the nature of this business that you often don't know what you want till you've seen what you don't want. Jil Sander's show offered elegance, restraint, sobriety in such crisp, clearly defined terms that it could almost function as a manifesto for whatever comes next. Still, you craved the tweak. Maybe it was there in that flash of fur or splash of gold. What joy it would be if this were the start of an unexpected wingy-ness in a designer who truly has nothing left to lose in exploring the deep-rooted whys of what she does.
22 February 2013
"Epic masculinity." That was the florid claim Jil Sander's press notes made on her behalf. There is no masculinity more epic than a military man's, so it seemed logical enough that Sander's collection would draw on military references: double-breasted great coats, stand-up collars, army greens and Russian reds, maybe even a bandolier effect in the crisscross pattern on a sweater. But no, insisted Sander. No theme, just mood. And the mood was vintage Jil: high-closing three-button suits, elongated knits, mysteriously textured fabrics. It was, the designer claimed, important that the clothes encapsulated her past. That equaled integrity for her. The sleeveless bits and pieces were a throwback to the vulnerable Sander boy (even if theywererendered in black pony skin). But, mercifully, it was more the label's future that the show pointed toward, and that future looked bright. For one thing, Sander marched out a collection of coats that will be hard to better this season. For another, her repertoire of tones and textures managed to inject a subtly off-center degree of interest into menswear standards: sweater, peacoat, caban, duffel, blouson. That stand-up military collar, for instance, was actually Sander's version of a stand-alone scarf, detachable, to inject formality at will.You could never claim Sander as the most lighthearted of designers (her soundsmith certainly took up those cudgels today by soundtracking her show with the sepulchral croon of Scott Walker), but there was a note of restrained celebration in this collection. Epic? No. Masculine? Yes. Menswear is easy, Sander insisted. It's womenswear that's the drama.
11 January 2013
"Summer is a good place to start," said Jil Sander of her return after eight years to designing womenswear under her own name. "It's light." Indeed. Sander's blinding white show space was as clinically lit as an operating theater, which gave a stark, institutional edge to some of the pristine looks she showed in cotton or piqué. Alternately, it could have been a sci-fi vision, an association the designer sparked when she decorated the collection's dressier looks with big, shiny, rubberized polka dots.The minimalist who stands on the edge of the future—we've been here before. So, although the show notes spoke of a "Reset to Zero," Sander insisted her new collection was no blank slate—or fresh start. She is, after all, coming off a three-year collaboration with Uniqlo, and her time spent in Tokyo seems to have helped motivate her current energetic reengagement with the world of high fashion. But fashion's axis has shifted, and now the Queen of Clean has serious competition, not least from the man who most recently occupied her place at her label. Viewed as an exercise in re-staking her claim, today's show made a worthy enough start. It's easy to see why Sander prefers words like "purity" and "integrity" to the more commonly used "minimalism" or "reduction." Her designs were both pure and true to her ethos, which is to make an intelligent, respectful appeal to women of all ages. The show opened, for instance, with a sleeveless coat-dress that, over a white blouse, looked like a schoolgirl jumper—perfect for the gravely pretty models whose hair and makeup seemed designed to emphasize their youth. But it was followed by another coat-dress whose sleeves fell to just below the elbow, a proportion that was chic but kind for an older customer.Sander claimed her key question for any woman is "How do you feel?" She'd probably like her women to feel like her: always curious, never stopping. That's why movement underscored the collection—all kinds. Take the jacket whose subtly exaggerated back allowed for an elegant swing; or the less successful oversize culottes that swished like a silk skirt; or the boots with zips that spiraled around the calf. Sander also corralled the movement with tapered silhouettes that struck quietly sophisticated chords.All of which sounds like Sander ran a real gamut today. At the very least, it suggests she has opened her arms a little wider to the world. Once fiercely private, she was even introducing family members backstage.
The way she tells it, Tokyo helped expand her horizons. And Sander's acknowledgment of just how complicated women are signposts the challenge she has elected to take on. If she's not going to make life easy for herself, she may be about to make it more interesting for us.
21 September 2012
Jil Sander has seen the view from this backstage area many times. It was, for instance, the space where she showed her first men's collection 15 years ago. But today, the tower of the Castello Sforzesco was swathed in scaffolding. "Under construction," the designer remarked, with the droll insinuation that what her audience was about to see was also a work in progress. Don't call it a comeback, though. It's not like she's been out of work. Sander was quick to point out that her gig with Uniqlo kept her busy, with trips to Tokyo every six weeks. There, her mantra was "Class for all." Here, for her return after seven years to the label that bears her name, she'd updated it: "Comfort, fashion, class."The show notes mentioned "unlearning easy," and there was an unquestionable formality to the long, lean, almost Edwardian proportions of the jackets and coats, many of them double-breasted, some of them sleeveless and worn over white poplin shirts. Maybe the tailoring was the class. Sander paired those pieces with shorts voluminous enough to be considered board shorts. They were definitely the comfort. They were also a reminder that one of Sander's stated criteria when she designs for men is "Not like Papa," the point being that guys don't want to dress like their dads. Which is why the baggy shorts might also have belonged to German schoolboys of a distant and more authoritarian era. (There were schoolboy cowlicks in the hair department as well.)Perhaps the shorts brought the fashion too, even if they did cover the knee, which is so far Spring 2013's favorite male feature. Another fashion statement was made by the colors and prints, from knitwear and gauzy tees, with constructivist color-blocking and patterning inspired by artists Blinky Palermo and Robert Mangold, to cabans in buttery yellow and vivid cobalt blue, to a coat and shirt in a matching honeycomb pattern.This of course is not the first time Sander has retaken the reins here after a hiatus of one kind or another. But setting aside the brutal truncation of Raf Simons' stint under her name, this was a much more confident, convincing homecoming than Sander's last try. She knew it. She was positivelyradiantbackstage. And she didn't wait for the million-dollar question. She asked and answered it herself. "Why do I keep working? Because Iloveit."
22 June 2012
The audience stood and cheered for Raf Simons as he took his final bow at Jil Sander today. Then they continued to stand and cheer until the designer, overwhelmed by emotion, reappeared on the catwalk. An ovationandan encore: That is the very definition of a hard fashion act to follow.Which is exactly as it should be, given what Simons has achieved in his seven years at Jil Sander. Never mind that this was the best collection he'd presented for the label. In light of the week's events, there was an unwittingly bitter irony to the story it told. After last season's women's-world scenario, Simons wanted to celebrate a day in the life of a relationship, the pure and simple pleasure of two as one. But Raf's no Pollyanna. He was equally engaged by the hard work it takes to maintain such an ideal. So he introduced chaos into his dream world. The most graphically significant element in his collection might have been the slash of shine that split open Julia Nobis' strapless matte black sheath. Thus are hopes and dreams splintered.Before that climactic moment, however, there was a seamless parade of peerlessly beautiful dresses and coats. A grace note was struck from the moment models entered clutching their coats closed. In Raf's day-in-the-life scenario, these might have been bathrobes, just as insinuations of slips and nighties crept in later. A palette of blush pink, coffee, and pale gray underlined an early-morning feel. The soundtrack was Mazzy Star's "Fade into You" and Sonic Youth's version of the Carpenters classic "Superstar," both songs where love is lorn. Can melancholia be uplifting? Here be proof, compounded by Smashing Pumpkins' "Tonight, Tonight," one of Simons' favorite songs. It sounded like anenvoito the Sander years.He called his previous three seasons for Sander his "couture trilogy," and even before this week's shock announcement that he was departing and the house's namesake founder was returning, Simons had decided he wanted to unhinge the perfect universe he'd created. The leathered-up menswear collection he showed here in January cued a dark finale for his womenswear, where black leather and PVC threw a fetish wrench in a perfect day. Again, irony, in that the complete control of his Spring collection implied that chaos is a shot away. And here it finally was. Good luck to his successor. She'll need it.
24 February 2012
You know that Raf Simons orchestrates every single detail of his presentations. So every single detail is worthy of consideration as an instant of insight into the designer's mind. The obvious starting point for interpretation with Raf's Jil Sander show today was the set: a floor laid with rubber matting which reeked of cars, a blank back wall with a graffiti-ed door. We were in an underground parking garage. There was an increasingly urgent ticking, that door swung open, and a man entered in a huge black leather trenchcoat, while the theme from director Steve McQueen's cinematic cause célèbreShameswelled on the soundtrack. After the show, Raf was insistent that he wanted people to wonder who this man was. Where had he been? What had he been doing? A scenario of horror and pain seemed like an obvious human response. "What you see is who you are," was Raf's droll backstage comeback. But that seemed like a cop-out, given that a guy in a black leather trench in an underground garage is more likely to be Dexter than Mr Rogers.But that was really the challenge of this entire collection. If a black leather trench says fascist henchman to you, if Trent Reznor's "Animal" (which followedShameon Michel Gaubert's soundtrack) strikes you as a minor masterpiece of misogyny, these weren't your clothes. Raf claimed he'd isolated certain key components of the way men dress, but just look at those components: black leather, a sailor collar, a suit. What men are defined by that curious assemblage? He said he wanted a cross-generational thing: the man who is a father, the man who stays a boy. In other words, masculinity that is troubled for whatever reason. On that level at least, the Jil Sander collection delivered. The tailoring was extraordinary, but the seaming on one leather jacket was almost corsetlike, and the swathes of black (impossible to tell—calf leather or waxed nylon?) were so sinister as to swallow light. Deliberate on Raf's part: "With Jil, we've been so daring with color, and black is so specific, now we're being daring with black." The idea of the dare was clearly significant. When he was challenged on who the man emerging into the underground garage was, he said, "A very luxurious man who's daring with material." Not Dexter after all, in other words.In fact, there's a rather more enchantingly subversive interpretation of this dark cavalcade, which paints Raf as the couture king of the Occupy movement.
The suit is the armor of the banksters who stole the bailout and rode roughshod over the 99 percent. Cut that suit in black leather and you've got yourself a cloak of evil. Raf paraded it with exactly the same repetitive force that Steve McQueen used inShameto portray his main character's empty serial sexual encounters. And that character was, of course, a money man.
13 January 2012
Raf Simons traded in the couture salons of the 1950's for a midcentury boarding school. Where Spring was about sophistication and control, his new pre-fall lineup came with a youthful kick. See the letterman sweaters and sweatshirts embroidered with colorful Js and Ss (instant hits, those) and shrunken satin jackets emblazoned with words such asFaith,Promise, andEternal, like something one ofGrease's Pink Ladies might've worn if she came from the right side of the tracks.The camp element certainly felt new from Simons, but strip away those details and what was left were elegantly made preppy classics: a camel overcoat, an ivory stadium jacket, and menswear patterns on day dresses with rounded shoulders and full tulip skirts. In other words, this collection was not quite the reversal it at first appeared to be.
11 January 2012
"The last in my couture trilogy" was Raf Simons' description of today's Jil Sander show. His fascination with traditional couture codes and the women who followed them has transformed his approach at the house, compelling him toward his best work. With this new collection, Simons pulled a whole lot of threads together to tie up his story. One thread was his undiminished sensitivity to the Sander legacy: the purity, the elitism, the artistry. But another, more interesting one was his own wonderment at the world of women and the closed societies they create for themselves.Here, there was the beauty parlor/spa scenario that opened the show, with the signature Jil Sander white poplin shirt reconfigured to read as garb for either therapist or client. The show closed with another passage of white that reflected Simons' longtime fascination with the female rituals associated with marriage.How would a woman look if she got married in Jil Sander?he asked himself. Quite fabulous, if that last floor-sweeping, bowed-at-the-waist, Grace Kelly number was any indication.There's something endearing, almost naive, in such a question when it's attached to a label as quintessentially sophisticated as Jil Sander, but that is what Simons has brought to the brand: a deeply inquisitive, wide-eyed open-mindedness that has allowed him to insinuate his own passions into the Sander lexicon. Today, there were some great intarsias lifted from Picasso ceramics. "The icon of modernism," Simons called him. But the visuals were also an elementary cue for the mid-century modern spirit that was the foundation of the collection. The lean, tailored, below-the-knee lines of Simons' dresses were all about complete mastery of his métier, the same quality you'd recognize in a couturier, an architect, an artist. But these are clothes we're talking about, after all, so there were color, texture, and patterns, too. Gingham and paisley, in fact. Just about as trad as they come.Emblematic, also, of a more hope-filled era. There was that in today's show, as there was in Miuccia Prada's show the other day. These women in their glossed, pure spa world were visions of a perfectly controlled moment of unambiguous optimism about the future. "Yes, optimism," agreed Raf. "And health!" But the underlying frisson was, of course, that the millisecond complete control is relinquished, chaos will naturally reassert itself. And that may well be the cue for Raf's next chapter at Jil Sander.
23 September 2011
The artist currently featured at the Serpentine Gallery in London is the Turner Prize-winning Mark Leckey, whose most famous work isFiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a video piece that distills two decades of English club culture into 15 minutes. It was an early influence on Raf Simons, and he returned to it today with a men's collection for Jil Sander that aimed to similarly telescope the style of each of the postwar decades into one disorienting whole. If in theory, that meant forties to noughties; in practice, it resulted in a collection as fragmented as the soundtrack, which mashed together shards of Bowie, Bauhaus, and Teutonic electronica in an aural assault. Maybe it was that sound that provoked the hard-edged images of Berlin in the early eighties that defined the look and style of the show. Simons himself envisaged something likeBlade Runner, with its uncomfortable collision of cultures.Time was as fluid as gender in a collection that saw one model dressed in the kind of high-waisted rah-rah shorts last seen on forties pinups, another in shorts in an oil-slick techno fabric that came from tomorrow. There were plenty more shorts—Simons felt they added dynamism to the show. A crocheted sweater, with all its connotations of folksy home crafts, was covered with a clear PVC jacket from a perv-y sci-fi movie. A straight-from-film-noir navy suit with a tightly tailored jacket and baggy pants shared runway space with second-skin coats in lacquered eelskin. The models had body bags strapped across their chests, the kind of thing a surfer might wear to keep his stuff dry, or a traveler might keep documents in. Maybe that hint of the young global nomad spurred the sense that the collection was somehow unfinished. "The Generation of Today is a Generation of All Times," announced the press notes, but youth itself is unfinished, which is why Simons is perpetually drawn back to it as the central preoccupation of his work. Today's show suggested it might be time to move on.
17 June 2011
The howling of arctic winds on the soundtrack introduced Raf Simons' note-perfect hybrid of skiwear and haute couture. After last season's focus on the long skirt, he was keen to inject energy and movement into his fascination with formal fashion. Looking at Louise Dahl-Wolfe's midcentury images of couture photographed in ski resorts, Simons had a eureka moment. But equally, he was drawn to the photography of Diane Arbus and the way she combined a career in fashion with a love of all things twisted. His implication was clear: He identified. That's why his collection for Jil Sander twisted together extremes as unlikely as the volumes of Cristobal Balenciaga and the body consciousness of downhill racers.Simons has always loved the middle ground between extremes. He calls it "the interzone" (it's an idea that has probably captivated him from the moment he first listened to Joy Division), and here it was best embodied by a combination that, on paper at least, was fiercely unlikely: a couture-worthy cocoon coat with stirrup pants, one of the most derided items of clothing in the modern fashion lexicon. But Simons treasured his. They were precisely pleated, and accommodated by a special slot cut in the wedge heels of the collection's shoes. The designer had really thought this through. The shoes were inspired by the work of Jacques Adnet, a favorite decorator of the midcentury couture elite. The same obsessive attention to detail meant the collection's gorgeous floral prints were a literal couture throwback, to a print by legendary fabric house Bucol.But that makes everything sound much too academic, when it was actually as immediate as a Winter Olympics-ready knit. The innate streamlined modernism of such a piece was a natural for Simons. So was an idea as arcane—and yet as logical—as down-filled skirts and tops in silk-nylon. If they looked voluminous, they were literally featherlight, which made them an apt metaphor for the whole gloriously mutant collection.
25 February 2011
Raf Simons claimed he wanted to go back to the roots ofJil Sander's menswear for Fall. He was thinking about the reduction, the purity, the very specific fabrics, and even the Amish influence on those early days. But ultimately, it was his own take on the elements that constitute "Jil Sander" that determined the nature of the collection.Intriguingly, Simons designed without a single piece of clothing from the archive in his studio, which is probably why the most immediate cross-reference was his own Spring womenswear for Jil. For his women's show, he talked about "a mille-feuille of color." Here, it was subtly adapted, particularly in the doubled turtlenecks. Pink lined a parka hood, yellow shone from under a swirling charcoal coat. The experimental volumes of the women's clothes were toned down but still implied, for instance, in the caped back of a blouson. And the chunky parkas that cut such a dash last season made a welcome reappearance. So that was the Raf-ness of the show.The Jil-ness came through in the plain, felted square-cut suits—three buttons, high closing. They were paired with similarly shaded tops and, even when colored broom yellow or cyclamen, they had a distinctly sober air. Simons elaborated on the sobriety by using the quilting of the Amish as the signature detail for jackets, pants, and tops. On the other hand, he injected an ironic note by duplicating the nobility of the handcrafted Amish tradition with the most advanced fabric technology. That's where Raf-ness and Jil-ness reunited—and it felt so good.
14 January 2011
The "mille-feuille of color" that was theJil SanderSpring show has been dialed down several notches for pre-fall. Raf Simons did turn out a boxy, slightly oversize parka in a bright, seventies-ish orange inspired by a Scandinavian furniture fabric. But overall, the look was more subdued and more masculine—more signature Simons, in other words—with wear-to-work pieces in place of T-shirts and couture ball skirts.That doesn't mean there weren't things to get excited about, chief among them an excellent color-blocked shift that mixed shades of gray and navy with that orange. A brushstroke print influenced by the Russian painter Serge Poliakoff added a lush, earthy element to Simons' precisely tailored pantsuits and the tunics he paired over narrow pants in the emerging style of the season. As always at this house, the fabrics were top-notch. Among the coolest executions: an oxblood leather peacoat that reversed to slate nylon.
12 January 2011
The way Raf Simons tells it, he was sitting around with his team discussing the new minimalism and that got him thinking about its inverse, maximalism, which led him instantly to haute couture. That presented an implicit challenge to the very essence of the Jil Sander woman, and it must have excited Simons, because it inspired a standout collection that looked to have revived his commitment to the label. For a designer who is as mesmerized by line and proportion as he is, there can ultimately be no more seductive métier than couture—but where traditional couturiers have been paying lip service to the modernizing possibilities of the T-shirt-and-ball-gown combo for a dog's age, he made it a walking, talking proposition with his opening passage of major skirts and minor tops. (This may call for a tip of the cap to Isaac Mizrahi, but read on.)Couture gigantism took hold with infantas of flowers and stripes, though Simons was keen to ground any notion of excess. The music veered from Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack forPsychoto Busta Rhymes. The models carried what looked like plastic shopping bags. A navy parka wrapped Freja Beha Erichsen's strapless bubble of Japanese techno taffeta. Such offhand extravagance reminded some onlookers of Yves Saint Laurent's fascination with the English operagoers who'd throw a raincoat over their ball gowns when they went to the cultural institution Glyndebourne in the south of England.The YSL poke was appropriate for another inescapable reason. Simons has been trying to unravel Saint Laurent's color sense since at least before his men's show at Pitti Uomo in Florence in June. His forensic analysis carried over into this collection. Where do you start giving this palette its due? The green cargo jacket with the pink tank and the yellow palazzo pants? The violet blouson over the gown in fluoro orange? The red coat layered over pinkandyellow jackets? Such lightness. Simons said it best: "A mille-feuille of color."If the show had a hell-bent-for-leather verve about it, Simons really had no choice. There is no way you could make this kind of statement in a half-hearted way. But among the grand gestures, the collection could be broken down into a slew of want-ables: the parkas, for one thing; the stripes; all the tailoring. Still, in an ideal world, it would be those huge, glorious skirts that would be sweeping all before them down your local high street.
24 September 2010
The gardens of what is reputedly the most beautiful villa in all of Florence provided the venue for the celebration of Raf Simons' fifth anniversary designing Jil Sander menswear. And, as he told Style.com the other day, the setting also offered up nature as an inspiration. She was at her most wayward on Thursday, blowing out the windows at Pitti with a raging hailstorm, casting a lowering shadow over Raf's garden party, but then providing an epic sunset for guests as they arrived at the villa. You can't compete with those effects. But Simons is certainly the right designer to extract order from all that chaos. He chose friction as a response, just as you'd expect him to.To a soundtrack of vintage techno, almost by definition the most unnatural sound known to man, he presented a profusion of color—but unlike any colors you'd find in nature. Intense fluoro shades were combined and layered to create a synthetic sundae. A hot pink shirt paired with bright orange pants sounds like the kind of combo that might generate some hibiscus heat. In Simons' hands, it was a cool, precise challenge to nature's own chaotic palette. As literal as he got was a floral print, dark and clotted. It translated well to a jersey body with a tattoo effect (bringing to mind an old something by Jean Paul Gaultier, a designer Simons admires).The overt sensuality of such an item and the op art graphism of some striped pieces struck chords in a collection that otherwise felt familiar. The uniform tailoring is a Simons signature. Interrupting the formality of that tailoring by showing a jacket with a pair of what looked like boxers is the kind of boy-centric ploy he's used before. The synthetic color-blocking is not new to him (hello, Yves Klein blue). Even the accordion pleating on a jacket sleeve or the back of a coat harked back to the recent past. Predictability would once have been anathema to Raf, but again, as he said to Style.com, he wants to "free Jil from itself," leave a different kind of vocabulary for whoever eventually follows him at Jil Sander. As a man with legacy (and an anniversary) on his mind, it makes sense he would want to consolidate the signatures he's established at the brand. So this was the kind of familiarity that bred content (not quite the old-shoe variety, though, because the pink-soled black oxfords were a gold star). Still, familiarity was an odd sensation to feel at the end of anything connected to Raf Simons. Nature at least was patient.
The rain held off till the last models had disappeared back into the topiary.
16 June 2010
Women buzzing to and fro in neat-to-the-body jackets, sheer shorts, bodysuits, tailored catsuits, and formfitting coats, equipped with Velcro-fastened flat boots and handbags. What was this about? In the words of creative director Raf Simons: "Women who have a target, and go for it."That motivational motto might respectably be emblazoned above the door of every Jil Sander store as a welcome to all who must travail under the yoke of executive womanhood. Simons had come to this philosophical distillation after watchingLara Croft: Tomb RaiderandThe September Issue, and traces of the wardrobes of both movies' stars—Angelina Jolie's stretchy shorts suits, and Anna Wintour's fitted tweed checks—were merged, streamlined, and reanimated on the runway.Simons' earnest search for a way to represent pared-down, practical dressing for grown women in the twenty-first century is, of course, part of the broader fashion debate that has erupted this season, and it's one that this brand, above all, has to take on. Though part of the collection was posited in sci-fi and computer-game fantasy (the all-in-ones and knitted shorts suits), the rest (fly-front jackets, skirtsuits, and slim coats) still essentially came back to the stock patterns of the Jil Sander nineties. Simons' choices of fabric—the softly colored windowpane checks, scumbled tweeds and knits—are undoubtedly supple, deceptively light, easy to wear, wholly of today. But the questions still left hovering over his severe vision of the female go-to-work uniform are legion. Does a new generation of breadwinners really want to go back to the strict suiting patterns their elders felt dynamic in 15 years ago? Is "minimal," in that sense, actually retro? And does the sight of so many women powering around like work-driven robots reflect back an image that leaves us more uncomfortable than inspired?
25 February 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
15 January 2010
Back to the land. For reasons that are purely instinctual, the emotional fallout of last year's economic crash seems to be leading a lot of creative people to think fundamentally about the vast outdoors, landscape, the elements. That fascination has been cropping up in many style magazines lately and has caught the imaginations of Proenza Schouler and Rodarte in recent collections. In Milan, it has affected Raf Simons, too. "I find myself going back into nature," he said. "It's quite simple, as well as intellectual." That was why his clothes took on a rough-hewn edge—dresses in which layers of fabric were peeled back and left hanging in patches; linen and gauze tailoring patched together in sheer and opaque zones; and knitwear manipulated into complex conceptual surface patterns to conceal and reveal skin in unexpected ways.If that sounds "rustic" (which is another way this trend can take people: see Ralph Lauren)—wrong impression. Simons' look was far more conceptual than that and was inspired by looking at the work of land artists and Antonioni's 1970 filmZabriskie Point.We knew this because Simons spelled out his sources beforehand on multiple video screens showing clips of work by various artists, including Christo, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Richard Wilson—grainy film of land being wrapped, buildings being demolished, and so on. When the show started, all the screens switched to the famousZabriskie Pointsequence of couples rolling in the dust of Death Valley, while the movie soundtrack played in the background. As a performance in real time, it was all a bit didactic, not to say distracting to watch, especially as there was already so much—too much, really—going on in the clothes.What's discernible at first impression is that, aside from the showpieces, there are still plenty of the regular, neutral-toned city daywear options a businesswoman wants from Jil Sander. The navy pantsuit with a wider leg and a belted blazer looked modern-minimal in the house tradition, and there were many jackets, such as those in glazed hopsack linen, to service customers who can't go to work in a piece of art. Otherwise, what came across in this show was that Simons has gotten his way in insisting on the freedom to experiment with Jil Sander. (There was a moment last season when the shuttering of the Hamburg atelier made it seem like that era was drawing to a close.
) That's a good thing, of course, though there's still a sense that he could convey more by condensing what he has to say.
24 September 2009
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
19 June 2009
Total clarity of vision and superb quality were the two elements that magnetized Jil Sander addicts for 20 years. They were back in full force at the beginning of Raf Simons' Fall show, demonstrating to all that the power of a spare double-faced cashmere coat over a simple turtleneck dress or a camel coat with narrow navy pants is undiminished. It was, quite deliberately, classic Sander, relying on nothing more than the visual beauty of spare proportions, perfectly tailored raised seams, covetable fabric, and a flat shoe—in a bright color to amp up the modernity. For a moment, it was a serene outbreak of sanity, when elevated design and purposeful fashion were, for once, walking in step. "This is Jil heritage," Simons said later. "I like it and it's always there, but sometimes we don't show it."Yet beneath the calm and the promise there was an unspoken drama unfolding offstage—the homage to the label's founder was in a way the final act at the end of an era. The atelier in Hamburg—which has been working continuously to produce Sander's samples even after Jil departed—is set to close, dispersing the skilled workers who built the house product. There was no official announcement of this, but at the end of the show an emotional Simons brought out Sander's head of atelier, Christel Von Kiedrowski, to share his bow.But before that happened, there was part two of the collection to take in: the segment in which Simons delivered his own vision for taking the brand forward. For a few seconds, the room fell into darkness, punctuated by colored flashing lights. Then he sent in clothes inspired by the mid-century French ceramicist Pol Chambost: shapes with sculptural curves; fold-back flanges; and spiraling, molded volumes. The Chambost references were in the glimpses of color—green, orange, yellow—flashing inside a funnel neck, a dipping hemline, or a peeled-away back view. As experiments in form, some looked awkward, literally vaselike, and seemingly not attuned to female figure or movement. Others, like the black dresses with flying points shooting off one shoulder, touched an elegance that could believably stand up at a cocktail party. In the broader context of fashion, it bore similarities to the work the likes of Roland Mouret and Nicolas Ghesquière have been doing, but it showed that Simons is ambitious to find his own way of designing for women.
How hard he will find it to continue that degree of research without the resource of the Sander atelier remains to be seen. But with this collection he may have taught himself a lesson. If he can maintain the level of pragmatic clarity he demonstrated at the beginning, he will really keep his customers happy.
26 February 2009
What is it about the twenties that is playing on so many designers' minds? For Raf Simons at Jil Sander, it was the moment the Parisian avant-garde discovered African art and gave birth to modernism: Simons referenced this by projecting a Man Ray photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse cradling an African head sculpture onto the backdrop of the runway as the audience assembled. Simons said it was just a matter of spontaneous instinct that made him take flapper fringing as a central device in the show. "But it was more about the aesthetics of that time. I didn't want to do a 'Charleston' collection," he said. "Jil Sander must always be pure, and I'm aware of making any reference minimal, but I also want to show my freedom to be inspired by the moment."The opening of the show was a powerfully graphic series of one-color silhouettes in which silken skeins of fringing were draped over stretch bodysuits. It began a sequence of precision-cut experiments in form that abstracted tailoring into unexpected elements—shorts suits sliced into sharp, asymmetric angles at the front; hemlines constructed from rectangular panels; jackets made with a swooping drape in the back; leather shifts with incisions left open at the hip.To be sure, Simons' exhaustive demonstrations of a million new ways to loop, drape, and fly a fringe (they even dangled to floor level on bags) did eventually tip over into tedium. He could have dispensed with a lot of that, but the development of his overriding vision of a clean, even glacial modernism is a powerful thing to watch.
22 September 2008
The disconnect between the runway and reality is the most challenging feature of a fashion designer's job. Most of the time, you can deal with it by being swept up in the aesthetic moment, the carefully chosen soundtrack, the models, their hair and makeup—the aggregate of one's intent. But Raf Simons capsized this easy option with his latest collection for Jil Sander. It was serene, beautiful, enchanting…but I couldn't picture a soul in the clothes. The exquisite precision of the collection felt entirely cerebral, which was paradoxical, given that the fabrics were color-blocked in such a way that a band of jersey, say, would draw a jacket close to the body. A short-sleeved jacket in stretch cotton also defined the torso. Zippers and elastication were used to trim the silhouette, again emphasizing the body. (The ring pulls on the zippers were triangles, squares, and circles, underlining the geometric precision of the clothes.)How could so much attention to the human form seem so…abstract? Maybe the answer lay in a safari jacket, short-sleeved in suede. Again, exquisite, but perhaps too pure for this world, like the little fluffy clouds the Orb was making music about in the background. Such is the nonpareil niche that Simons has carved for himself. (Base curiosity wonders whether the circular pattern on the shirts was derived from the portholes of the Maritime, Raf's hotel of choice in New York.)
20 June 2008
To start his Fall collection for Jil Sander, Raf Simons set his team a technical challenge. "I asked the tailors to work on dresses, and the dressmakers to get involved with the tailoring. I wanted to see how we could use heavy tweed in a fresh, elegant, architectural way." The results: fitted dresses, with raised darts running vertically through the torso or horizontally around the body; jackets with high, asymmetrically wrapped funnel necks; a long essay on the pantsuit. It was severe, austere, and it kept many in the audience rapt at the sight of an intelligent designer working on a vision of dressing that applies to a life they actually find themselves leading.Perhaps it takes an outsider to get a new perspective on this. Simons comes from menswear, from a tradition that respects practical end uses and appreciates how tiny calibrations of cut and fabric can change the sense of a garment. He's also equipped with an analytical mind that doesn't confuse the drive to be innovative with designing "conceptually." It's been a long time since womenswear designers have entered that kind of discussion, but now that a talent has cropped up who is attending to such issues as what to wear to work, or how to dress for evening while staying sleek and sophisticated, no wonder the fashion-disenfranchised are riveted.There was plenty in this collection—the long-sleeve day dresses, the extraordinary tucked-wool evening column—to satisfy this audience. Truth to tell, though, there are aspects of Simons' work that need further refinement. One: The hobbling, painful footwear he insists on using is antithetical to a female-friendly aesthetic. Two: his pants. Something about them is still not working, after three seasons of his showing virtually the same shape. They may be as skinny as can be, but when the models walked away, something wrinkly was going on that really needs to be fixed. Preferably by a tailor rather than a dressmaker.
17 February 2008
Beethoven's 7th on the soundtrack, marble cited as an inspiration in the show notes, a pattern of watery ripples spreading across a coat, a top…put all of that together and one might justifiably assume Raf Simons had looked to Venice as inspiration for his latest Jil Sander collection. But despite a somber, monumental air to the clothes, "fragmentation" was in fact Simons'mot du jour. The way that marble and stone crack over time into veiny fragments offered the designer a golden (or maybe granite) opportunity to inject a graphic element into a collection that has previously been distinguished by its monochromatic purity. At the same time, it gave him a chance to make a statement about the way that fashion's past, present, and future are endlessly de- and re-constructed. If his concept wasn't entirely successful, it's possibly because there was so much marbling—in coats and suits with matching totes and turtlenecks, and a fuzzy mohair for good measure. It felt oddly retro, like a splash-dash New Wave moment. The eighties effect was compounded by a silhouette that pumped up the volume on top and trimmed the leg away to a leotard slimness, ending in a shoe of a creeperlike chunk. (On the evidence of Milan's first day, early adopters are forecasting such bulk as the foot of the future.)The swell of Angelo Badalamenti's music forMulholland Driveoffered a better index of Simons' true gift. In a David Lynch-ian "Nothing is quite what it seems" way, the graphic texture of a coat suggested beading when it was actually tweed, and a pleating effect—sometimes horizontal, sometimes vertical—loaned a new definition to the body's movement. Simons reallythinksabout clothes, for which we can be eternally grateful. And he gives us more reason to be thankful when what he's thinking about gels with what we'd want to wear, as in a suit with a dull but seductive metallic gleam.
11 January 2008
There's no doubt Raf Simons has made significant strides toward putting the credibility back into Jil Sander. He sees the project clearly and clinically, rigorously realigning the brand with the purist, slightly Japanese-influenced values its founder brought to fashion. Part of the task is to renew the core of the label's tailoring, particularly by reinventing the money-spinning house pantsuit, which has to find a way to move on from the sober nineties template. That Simons did, by recutting the elements into two distinct silhouettes. The newer one shrinks the jacket to a super-short bolero; elongates the torso with a tight, hip-length knit; and then breaks into a full, fluid pant beneath. The other approach flips it, with a looser, longer jacket (chopped off at the shoulder as a bustier in the show's first exit) over pants so narrow they're virtually indistinguishable from leggings.To be picky on the pragmatic front, though—since Sander's high-flying customer base is that, above all—there are difficulties. One: The crop of the jacket might work on a flat-chested beanpole model, but on a woman with a real-life bosom? Two: Those super-skinny pants are not the most forgiving when viewed from behind. And then there's the color: Simons is right to seek an exit from the clichéd minimal-monochrome palette, but his liking for hot pink, orange, and vivid royal blue seems unlikely to hit the spot at retail. For all that eye-catching assertiveness—and the arty uses of sheer versus opaque, and organza-and-tulle pieces cut in circles and squares, and the passage of the Sander woman in holiday beachwear—it was two midnight blue looks that made the strongest impressions. One was a long jacket, semi-fitted in the front but nicely curved into the small of the back, the other an asymmetrically draped sleeveless dress; both were quintessentially the things that will keep the faithful shopping.
24 September 2007
The venue was illuminated by a misty glow, like an Olafur Eliasson installation, and it was indeed that odd kind of radiance that Raf Simons was seeking with his fourth men's presentation for Jil Sander. He referred to it as "phosphor," where color was pared away until all that remained was a hint ofeau de nilor gray or blue to shade his spare three-button suits. The theme of the collection was light—as in bright, as in weightless—and Simons underlined it by layering translucent nylon jackets over shirts, or using leather so fine it might have been paper for T-shirts, shorts, and suits.And, naturally, everything was shown on the delicately framed models the designer favors. But, lest his concept fade into an ether of preciousness, Simons injected some robust counterpoints in the form of earthy shades of red and green and a voluminous silhouette created by baggy, pleated trousers and shorts. For every piece that featured origamilike seaming derived from his most recent women's collection, Simons also showed a jacket that highlighted stitching inspired by workwear. This confident interplay between the ethereal and the down-to-earth played out to a soundtrack of upbeat techno from Kiki and Vitalic.
22 June 2007
Jil Sander may be the last designer resource for alpha-female corporate dressing left unbowed in the twenty-first century—it's certainly the only one that dares to air a full range of navy pantsuits on a runway. That unflinching Belgian pragmatism regarding the need for upper-echelon career clothes has, after three seasons, become Raf Simons' brand-stabilizing trademark, alongside the stamp of calm conceptualism he's bringing to the house.The show opened with a new, almost monastic, close-cut cape with a rounded shoulder, after which Simons reiterated the silhouette of narrow body-line coats and jackets with attenuated skinny pants, ballasting them, as before, with heavy black platforms. The variation among the plain blues and grays came in a few futuristic shot metallics, which broke out more delicately in a silver accordion-pleated dress for evening.The effect of all this was to make the eye search for the new points. Simons has added some terrific ribbed knits with little turned-down collars, including a maroon sweater dress. Most of the innovation, however, was concentrated in the intelligent minutiae. For example, he made the simple combination of a green skirt and a matching skinny, high-neck sweater look interesting by adding a wrapped-band waistline.Simons' dresses, too, have incisive economy of cut, like an otherwise plain short-sleeve boardroom sheath with a single off-center vertical raised tuck. That made the collection solid on go-to-work daywear, but for evening there were also outstanding pieces: a one-shouldered white sheath, and a little black velvet dress modernized with a pair of tramline seams in front. Those developments, along with three elegantly asymmetrical flyaway dresses, lent a degree of uplift to the conclusion of a businesslike message.
19 February 2007
For his third collection for Jil Sander, Raf Simons's ongoing redefinition of the label's menswear was as subtle as a single chalk stripe trailing down a navy jacket, an echo of the pinstripes that can be found hanging in many a male closet. But there was poetry in that lonely line, because Simons was aiming for nothing less than a new geometry of the body. Show notes invoked the sculptor Antony Gormley, whose work distills the human form into a graphic frame. Simons attempted something similar when he trailed two horizontal stripes in a sparkling metallic across a sweater, or wove a grid of lines on a double-faced wool coat, like a degraded windowpane check.But the graphics scarcely stopped with the woven and felted lines that framed knitwear, jackets, and coats. Simons also showed quilted-nylon blousons and coats in iridescent blue, copper, and green of an almost jewel-like intensity. He tucked a faux collar of metallic knit inside a navy sweater, then let a layer of the same knit peek out from under a sober cardigan (imagine discovering your granddad was a glam rocker on the side). Perhaps not exactly the revelation Simons had in mind, but certainly symptomatic of his knack for transmogrifying the mundane—even the toggles he used on his duffel coat made you sit up and look twice. And, since we're talking about contrasts, the shearlings shot with a single vertical strip of metal looked like essential winterwear for 2007/8. They may yet be the season's most artful comment on the crucial dialogue between Mother Nature and the Machine.
13 January 2007
It was sharp, precise, and pinging with hard, bright color. An acid-yellow shirt with a short, navy duchesse satin skirt. A skinny-legged black pantsuit with a cropped, high-fastened, one-button jacket, showing a flash of emerald shirt at the neck. An inky-blue elliptical dress with a drape in the back."I wanted energy," Raf Simons said of a Jil Sander presentation that read as a mandate for sense and simplicity. "And to show that the collection is not only for the needs of young women." Among the dispiriting confusion of beige and junior disco-flash that has bogged down Milan, Simons took on challenges that other designers have been frantically avoiding: working on a pantsuit, coming up with strategies to modernize a dress, making clothes that just might apply to the life of a high-achieving woman.To begin with, he did that by calibrating the millimeter of difference—in the sliver-width of lapel, or the placement and concealment of fastenings—that separates an innovative piece of tailoring from boring corporate uniform. Slim, fly-fronted coats and a multiplicity of short jackets, distinctively cut to stand slightly away from the body, achieved that. And if the ultra-narrow trouser isn't for everyone, he was careful to put in a reassuring wider option, too.All of the above faithfully walked the line marked out by Jil Sander in the nineties, but Simons also broke new ground by acknowledging the rising cohort of women who have added dresses to their daily repertoire. His office-appropriate navy sleeveless sheath with a drape in the torso, shimmery fish-scale ombré sequin cocktail dress, and to-the-floor button-through shirtwaister—and many more—showed that he even had that part of the equation down.
27 September 2006
The Balanescu Quartet's chamber-music take on Kraftwerk made a perfect sonic counterpoint to Raf Simons's second menswear collection for Jil Sander. The classicism of the style, the futurism of the content: There you have Simons in a nutshell. In that respect, he almost bears comparison to Cristobal Balenciaga, the greatest couturier of them all. And, like the master, he removed anything potentially distracting—the shoes were the same throughout, buttons were concealed behind fly fronts, trousers were worn beltless—in order that the important details stood out. To wit, the placement of pockets, or the treatment of seams.The volume that Simons proposed for fall carried through into the new season. This was most noticeable in "one-and-a-half-breasted" coats and jackets that stood away from the body, but it could also be traced, more subtly, in shirts that billowed lighter than air. A lot of that had to do with the fabric technology that Simons is perfecting in Japan: The polyester poplins he used for his blue-and-silvery macs were so flyaway they were almost transparent. By way of weighty contrast, a short-sleeved shirt in midnight-blue leather had been "diamond-polished" till it had the seductive sheen of an oil slick.Backstage, the designer acknowledged that his experiments with proportion at Sander are likely to be a slow evolution. When it came to color though, he went for broke this season, presenting shades so saturated they were practically luminous. Yves Klein blue, fire-engine red and an ice-creamy orange added a literally breathtaking punch to knit tops and polo shirts—a clear indication of Simons's confident mastery.
25 June 2006
Perhaps it takes one northern soul to understand another. In Raf Simons, a young Belgian man, it looks as if the Germanic purity of Jil Sander's womanly aesthetic has finally—after many painful seasons—found a worthy successor. Pantsuits, white shirts, scrubbed faces, clean hair: This was a back-to-basics show, but its attenuated lines gave the collection a confident shape. Backstage, Simons said shouldering the responsibility for continuity "feels good. This is an intimate company. It's all here, so I didn't have to worry about anything except concentrating on the outline."This house, of course, is founded on jackets and trousers, both of which Simons upheld to the letter. Boxy jackets cut from volume-retaining fabric came balanced over arrow-narrow, boy-tailored pants and high, wedge-heel boots. With those exaggerated lines he redrew the template upon which he superimposed refinements on Sander standards: short pea coats with sharply delineated volumes, two-button jackets, fly-front coats studded with a single top button, padded shapes in luxe techno fabric. They all walked by, in multiple fabric variations and colors from dark brown to inky black to ecru—a tad too many, in fact, to make the point.Just in time, Simons veered away from all that monasticism with black buttoned-up shirtdresses and loose, artily pleated shifts familiar to Sander fans. Where he made his own imprint was in a series of sinuously flowing floor-length dresses. Long-sleeve, and plain or simply knotted in front, they turned to reveal bare skin, and a tender gathering of folds drawn into the small of the back. Minimal, respectful, and highly erotic, they were a signal, perhaps, of something unusual Simons can bring to fashion: the touch of a heterosexual man.
19 February 2006
You could read the first jacket on the catwalk as a manifesto of Raf Simons' ascension to the creative directorship of Jil Sander. It was proudly boxy, with a single button set high, and shoulders broad and slightly dropped. In other words, a new proportion for a label that has specialized in the lean, youthful silhouette that currently prevails in menswear.New proportions, of course, are Simons' specialty (that boxiness creates a billow in the back, for instance), but with his first collection for this house, he also managed to honor the woman whose name is on the label. Sober but covetable clothes (the knitwear was especially impressive in that regard), intriguing techno-fabrics—these were signatures of Jil herself, and the way Simons evoked them suggests there is a natural compatibility between the two designers' sensibilities that makes this particular coup more logical than most. Just check the way a creamy beige leather jacket with shearling collar slyly captured the haute bourgeois edge of the Jil aesthetic.Still, there was no doubt this was a Simons show: it was clear in the gray that he favored, in the almost military precision of the dominant jacket-trouser-and-white-shirt combination, and in the soundtrack, which included a piano reinterpretation of a track by Aphex Twin, one of his favorite musicians.
15 January 2006
Waiting for Raf Simons—if not Godot—is the name of the game at Jil Sander. Doing its best to keep her minimalist leftovers warm, a nameless backroom team is designing the collection until the young Belgian appears, as promised, next season.The result—no surprise—was tepid. For starters, the committee had boiled down the essence of Sander to a white shirt and a cream, asymmetric wrapover skirt, which, though unobjectionable in itself, couldn't help but look bland. Other pieces—cigarette pants and shirts appliquéd with graphic patches, a funnel-neck white linen coat, a wraparound strapless dress fastened with a traily ribbon, and a zip-front shorts suit—illustrated how badly the label needs a fresh, intellectual designer to justify its standing as a thinking-woman's luxury brand. By the time Simons arrives, he'll have to tackle the issue of whether nineties minimalism itself can be renovated. That's the challenge, but it's good to look forward to a time when, with a strong leader installed, this collection will have something more interesting to say.
27 September 2005
A new day dawns at Jil Sander on July 1, when Raf Simons officially assumes his position as creative director. So this collection was logically viewed as a transition between Sander past and future—and just how smooth that transition is likely to be was made clear when Simons took his seat in the front row. The elegant, cadet-sharp simplicity of his appearance was perfectly in keeping with the Sander ideal. So, more surprisingly, were the clothes sent out by the caretaker team (the PR emphasis was very much on the collection as a collaborative effort). There was no hint of design by committee here. "Lightness and harmony" were the stated aims, and these were beautifully achieved.Jil's own affection for an idealized '50s Americana found expression in a Hawaiian sub-text—one shirt printed with surfing images, another with stylized starfish, a couple of gingham shirts over-printed with leis of bougainvillea, and shorts elongated like jams to just below the knee. When paired with the bandbox smartness of Sander's signature tailoring in navy or tan trousers (or white jeans), the result suggested officers on shore leave in Honolulu. And indeed, there was an almost military precision to the color scheme (navy, white, gray, tan), with a single sensational hit of tomato-red in a cropped jacket. The house's reputation for fabric research was honored in a salt-treated finish that crinkled a navy jacket, and a polyester-cotton blend that brought new lightness to a Prince of Wales-checked suit. The single bum note—wafer-thin-soled white shoes that uncomfortably echoed Capezios. Raf was probably relieved to see there was some room for improvement after all.
26 June 2005
There was an odd atmosphere hovering over the small gathering of people who were invited to view the last remnants of Jil Sander's work under her own name. The design team (who worked at her side in the nineties) finished the collection after she quit, so it was hard to look at the vaguely military-influenced collection without guessing where Sander left off and the anonymous backstage hands took over. Did she choose the dark melton cashmeres with their tab front fastenings, decide on the rounded shoulders and raised waists? Was she feeling for total looks of white or copper sequins before she left, or were those last two evening pieces filled in by the replacement committee?It doesn't matter, of course. Intellectual analysis stops now that the Sander era is over, and for the time being at least, the house's output need only be scored on its commercial merits. Judged in that light, it met the criteria of wearability, adaptation to current trend, and a certain minimal sharpness. Eighteenth century militaria was applied to dolman-sleeve jackets and high-belted short coats (though whether Sander would have placed fabric imitation medals on the breast of a jacket was a hard question to beat back). The inevitable egg-shape skirt, weighted by a deep band of fabric in the hem, came out paired with a Sander staple: a drapey, semisheer V-neck sweater. For evening, embellishment and shine cropped up, in the form of Western fringing embedded in the flanks of a velvet dress, and the aforementioned sequins, decorating a white coat and a copper dress. In general, it looked fine. But whether the collection will find footing as a leader or a follower in the seasons to come is an issue that's left hanging.
24 February 2005
This was Jil Sander's final collection for the house that bears her name (she announced in December that she was parting ways with Prada Group, which owns the label, for the second and last time.) Ironic, then, that the show had echoes of the influential Prada aesthetic, especially in its use of techno fabrics and matching shirt-and-tie combos, both monochrome and plaid. With anyone else, these could have been read as a case of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." But in fact, this calm, measured presentation felt like nothing so much as a designer withdrawing at the top of her game.From a start that was somber (layered black coats, one wool, one techno-synthetic), even sinister (a white shirt with skinny black tie and black gloves), the show opened out to offer the quietly irresistible clothes that have always been this designer's trademark. Double-pleated gray flannels with a Fair Isle sweater had a Gary Cooper elegance. Among a handful of immaculately constructed coats, a navy wool duffel was the standout. And even at the last, Sander continued to push forward, adjusting silhouettes by making her jackets shorter, or expressing her antipathy for useless ornament by removing sleeve buttons on coats and jackets (hallelujah!).So what next for the house that Jil built? Prada's plans for the label include building an accessories business, evident here in the selection of bags on parade. And an upbeat commitment to continuity seems to be the order of the day. As the show notes promised, "The beat goes on."
15 January 2005
Just when it seemed clothes couldn't get any more complicated, Jil Sander came along with a collection that blew away the fuss like a clean spring breeze. Take her opening look: a white jacket with a blue roller-print marking on the front, tucked into a cream pencil skirt, and worn with flats. Boring? Not at all—more like artistic simplicity. It takes world-class talent to give the elements of every day—shirts, blazers, pants, raincoats—a good name in the fashion book.Normal clothes like these haven't had much attention since Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada, and Sander herself defined nineties minimalism. Now she's doing it again, but this time with color, surface decoration, a relaxed sense of femininity, and none of her earlier tendency to abstruse abstraction. What woman wouldn't fall for a taupe trench, slightly A-line, with a couple of big chic brass buttons? Or a frilled shirt, a flattering pair of wide cuffed pants, a one-button jacket brilliantly cut in turquoise? You'd hardly expect frills in this formerly austere environment, but Sander added softness (say, a scarf tied in a bow) and turned one of her beloved techno-fabrics (an ultra-luxurious neo-taffeta) into a small-waisted weightless white coat with a tulle skirt sticking out beneath the oval skirt.Sander gave the trend toward ethnic influence a glance with an ikat-like computerized placement print, but there was no sense that she was leaning heavily on a theme. Interesting, light-handed sportswear is enough for her—and in overwrought times like these, that looks like a breakthrough.
30 September 2004
Jil Sander aimed for serenity with her latest men's collection. Her goal was a perfect balance of wardrobe essentials—the ideal shoe, the ideal jacket, the ideal pair of trousers (she favored a luxurious denim with a small roll-up). Enlivening these variations on a theme were the small details: the seductive sheen on a crisply tailored suit or a subtle flash of neon at a waistband. A plethora of pink tones was also part of her rosy vision.One thing was clear—the Harvard men whose wardrobe she referenced in her fall collection have now grown up and joined the work force. Some of them are on Wall Street, others are training as CPAs, and still others, in their Eisenhower jackets, are working as gas jockeys while they ponder their futures. Sander's idealized take on fifties Americana continues to provide one of the more poignant contemporary visions of the way men could dress.
28 June 2004
Clearly refreshed by the 3-year hiatus that ended with her spring 2004 collection, Jil Sander delivered a fall show that cut through the mixed-up flavors of current fashion like a palate-cleansing sorbet. Her new contribution is a gentler, less conceptual approach that embraces the desire for prettiness as well as coolly cut streetwear.Sander offered a confident, contemporary parallel to mainstream fashion's current ladylike agenda, showing amazingly cut pea jackets, lean pants, tweed princess coats, and A-line skirts. The effect was simple and sophisticated, thanks as always to the judicious manipulation of quietly luxurious fabric. Sander's customers have always trusted her to dispel the nightmare complications of getting dressed for a busy day and now they have an equally happy one-step solution for great eveningwear: Put on her strapless, understated cream dress and—sans jewellery, furs, accessories, or fuss—you will turn heads like a modern-day Audrey Hepburn in a room full of gussied-up matrons.Sander's comeback is proving the true value of personal, meticulously evolved design skills to the integrity of a brand. There is a clear difference between what we see now (the infinite care taken to mold the seaming and frame the stand of a collar in a herringbone tweed coat, for instance) and the generalized merchandising drive that prevailed in her absence. There's nothing intellectual about it, either: Countless women will relate to the easy simplicity of pairing a sweater with a black fan-pleated skirt, with a flash of silver in the front, or running off to work in a neat white half-belted trench. Sander's loyal customers are already back in droves: With this collection they're likely to be joined by a younger generation, shopping shoulder to shoulder.
25 February 2004
Tensions ran high during a lengthy preshow wait for Jil Sander’s highly-anticipated return to the runway. What would this former exemplar of nineties minimalism have to say to a world so drastically altered from the one she left three years ago? Would her reputation for rigor and abstract inventiveness still stand up? From her opening look—a delicate white cotton full-skirted dress with a tracery of sepia flowers printed on the bodice—it was obvious Sander has changed, but without losing herself.Her many faithful followers were always attracted to the fact that Sander designed clothes for an intelligent female sensibility, creating a practical laundry list of those most-difficult-to-find simplicities: a great white shirt, wonderful sweaters, a well-cut pantsuit. Coming back with a collection that emphasizes delicacy and femininity isn’t necessarily a contradiction of all that. “I feel I’ve grown up since I’ve been away,” she said, “and at the same time, I’ve become really interested in the joyful idea of being a woman. Stepping out for a little to watch the world has made me feel lighter.” That means good-bye to too much overwrought seriousness; Sander, like many of her working constituents, is conscious of the need to strike an emotional balance in life. But that hasn’t shaken her belief in the integrity of the white shirt, or the perfectly-flattering V-neck sweater. It just means that what she puts with them now might be a crinkly semi-sheer silk skirt, or a refined version of a flounced petticoat.Sander’s legendary insistence on using experimental fabrics and techniques is still very much apparent in her use of print, which turned up here as paint-rollered effects on dresses, some with their seams inverted and pressed flat. Her refined taste was present too in the colors she chose: cloudy gray, watery lemon, pale sage, and matte gold amid the predominant white. Miuccia Prada and her husband, Prada head Patrizio Bertelli watched from backstage; afterward, Bertelli, who owns Sander’s company, said, “It was a very positive, serene collection. It’s wonderful to welcome her back to the family.” A sentiment likely to be shared by Sander’s loyal customers everywhere.
2 October 2003
Audience expectations of the Jil Sander collection have shifted. No longer one of the high-flown conceptual agenda setters of fashion, it now belongs to the category of Milanese shows that process a general mood into a line firmly intended to be commercial.That means the success of the collection now depends on the market appropriateness of its chosen theme rather than groundbreaking inventiveness. For spring it was upscale athletic, this season posh punk. Milan Vukmirovic opened his show with a slick black patent motorcycle jacket, followed later by a beige patent trench. These, and a satin parka with straps and chrome D-rings, are the kind of items that can be cherry-picked out of the collection as reasonable, wearable classics that will be understandable when hanging in stores.More questionable was Vukmirovic's follow-through with the idea of plaid. Kilts—never terribly flattering at the best of times—came redone in tiers of pleats made into asymmetric skirts or extended into dresses. The impression of watered-down punk iconography continued in the white shirt with an appliqu¿ of embroidered wings on the back, the leather bondage neck piece that tethered a halter-neck silk scarf dress, and T-shirts with “Wild heart” and “Sweet Angel” printed on them. Of course, Vivienne Westwood, Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto have all had something gutsy to say on these subjects in the past, but Vukmirovic's interpretation went by without anything new to add.
1 March 2003
When Jil Sander walked away from the house that bears her name, its experimental, intellectual ethos went with her, ending a chapter in fashion history. Now, with a design team headed by former retailer Milan Vukmirovic, the line’s emphasis is making commercially viable sportswear.Spring’s direction is literally just that: a collection based on sporty clothing, a theme that emerged on London’s runways two weeks ago. Opening the show was a big, black, zippered cotton parka over shorts, paired with a shoe that is a cross between a high pump and a thong. The zipper motif was further explored in a punkish short dress and a sleeveless blouson, and eventually evolved into a tank top constructed of woven zips and a short dress made from a ballooning cascade of fasteners.A workout theme took over as Vukmirovic converted track pants, T-shirts and anoraks into luxury pieces using perforated leather, sheer fabrics and mesh. It all culminated in a gold bugle-beaded top ready for a sprint round the summer party circuit.
28 September 2002
The name Jil Sander has always been a touchstone to subtle-minded, confident women who demand rigor and sophistication in their clothes. With Milan Vukmirovic in the design seat, the label has seen an infusion of comfort and color to which its avid followers should have no problem relating.For Fall, the essential Sander values were reflected in two immaculate white coats, one in a bathrobe shape with a knitted collar, the other cut collarless in double-face cashmere. A strong line in office-appropriate cardigan knits ran through the show sometimes matched with long ribbed scarves and beanie hats. Those desperately seeking an interesting pantsuit, meanwhile, will find it in sand-colored needlecord, tailored on the bias with a stand-up collar—a creative twist on one of fall's ubiquitous fabrics. New to this formerly stark collection is the influx of the color purple and a concentration on feminine eveningwear—most successfully in a simple black velvet knee-length dress with long gathered sleeves, and a sweatshirt worn over a narrow beaded floor-length skirt.Vukmirovic is not an abstract thinker, but he brought a new warmth to the collection by paying attention to the ideas of the women who surround him. "The color purple came from listening to Prince," he said. "The rest was my women friends telling me they wanted the knitwear, jogging pieces and scarves we'd done in the menswear collection."
2 March 2002
More than a year after parting with its eponymous designer, Jil Sander is still struggling to find its footing as a world-class designer label.Milan Vukmirovic, who was appointed creative director of the house less than a year ago, provided a tepid follow-up to his Fall debut. While there were several perfectly proper, wearable pieces—a great woven-leather coat, sharply cut blazers and a smart little caftan dress with flat sandals—the overall mood of the show was that of a nonevent. Vukmirovic's leather chemises and evening halter dresses, all in muted tones, failed to convey a strong sense of emotion.Successful minimalist design requires an extremely precise sense of rigor, one that the Jil Sander design team must carefully pinpoint in order to maintain their status as a news-making brand.
29 September 2001
After being made to stand in a huddle for over half an hour in the freezing Milanese drizzle, frazzled editors were finally squeezed through a wall of thuggish security guards and into the Jil Sander showroom.Unfortunately, the wait was not particularly rewarding: Without its founding designer, Jil Sander has not yet managed to find its stride. Austere overcoats, blazers and sheath dresses blended together in a parade of black; a series of sheared fur jackets, burgundy velvet blazers and billowy trousers tucked into mannish boots could not alleviate the monotony. While there were a few smart dresses and all-purpose coats in the mix, it is clear that what Jil Sander the label misses desperately is, quite simply, Jil Sander the designer.
2 March 2001
There was great expectation surrounding the Jil Sander show, considering that it was the first Sander collection since the German designer parted ways with the Prada Group, which owns the label.The creative team who took over the brand clearly sought to adhere to Sander's essential dictums of clean shapes and simple design. The silhouette was definitely Sander—belted trenches, essential white shirts and unfettered shirtdresses looked perfectly proper, as did the classic light turtlenecks, now with a more ample armhole, and wearable pantsuits. Less accomplished were the high-waist trousers and skirts, which seemed cumbersome at times, especially with jackets tucked inside.The collection's overcast, gray color scheme did not help matters. What was missing most was Sander's inimitable lightness of touch, which simply cannot be duplicated, no matter how vast the archives she left behind may be.
3 October 2000
Jil Sander's strength has always been her self-assured simplicity of design. This season she experimented with a lighter, more feminine silhouette that included floral patterns and western shirts. Skirts had gathered waistbands; some dresses featured sash-like pleats on the front. Sander's softer side came through in the lacy chiffons and cottons she used, and in her precise use of color. The runway evoked a procession of sculptural cascades in black and white, with sporadic flashes of brown, beige, rose and yellow.
29 September 1999