Jil Sander. A resolute minimalism, an unwavering credo. An advertising disavowal, a challenge to trends. So many convictions which, since the 1960s, have formed the foundations of the German brand. This December 3, Prestel is publishing a new book offering intimate and unique access to the story of Jil Sander, designed in close collaboration with the designer herself.
“From my beginnings as an editor of a fashion magazine to the creation of my first collections, I had the opportunity to leave behind what had become insignificant and uninteresting and, in doing so, to open new spaces of possibilities”. It is in these terms that Jil Sander addresses the foreword to the thick book which now traces her career. Published by Prestel at the end of the year, Jil Sander by Jil Sander is neither a biography nor a book of images, it is a complete retrospective.
Designed by Irma Bloom, a Dutch book designer whose works are part of, among others, the collections of MoMA and the Center Pompidou, with texts by German journalist Ingeborg Harms, this new 360-page book looks at Jil Sander identity. Through his own eyes, his own words, but also through archive images captured backstage, captured in meeting rooms and immortalized on the podiums, it’s the whole ideology of the creator who reveals himself, with an open heart.
Jil Sander, chic minimal
Who knew that before showing, Jil Sander models were instructed to adopt a relaxed and confident posture, but devoid of any drama? “No hips”the German designer whispered to her models, before adding at the backstage entrance “Think of your mother”. No swaying, but a straight, sober stride, which leaves the dynamic load to the clothes and which, over the years, will become a signature. Anecdotes like this, Jil Sander by Jil Sander full of them.
The DNA of the brand established in the 1960s is dissected here and placed under a magnifying glass, that of fashion experts. This designer who says she was born in a white shirt and for whom opulence is above all a question of cut and quality textiles tells for example how, when touching a fabric, she immediately imagines her creations, a rough palm as a result, after long fabric fairs. Delving into the archives, Irma Bloom, Ingeborg Harms and Jil Sander herself establish what (a) makes the brand, today piloted by Lucie and Luke Meierwhat it is.
An almost monastic elegance, a work of lightness that competes with ornithological plumages, a duality between light and shadowin Jil Sander’s ideology, so-called ease and apparent effortlessness reign. Her collaborations with Uniqlo, her beauty line, the staging of her own image in advertising campaigns, whose sedentary laws she refuses, the use of Klein blue in contrast with bare skin, the purity, the movement of her parades in Hamburg after only three seasons in Paris and still, this invincible minimalism to the test of everything, Jil Sander is finally told by Jil Sander.
