Pop Magazine | written by Michael Collins

Jil Sander once noted that those who wear her clothes are not fashionable but modern. It’s a word too many have too little time for, but a word that we were once keen to be defined by. If we needed to be defined at all.

For, as we are aware, and as Virginia Woolf knew, so much so that she made it the theme of an essay - words fail us. ‘Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words,’ Woolf wrote, ‘they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old.’ Modern was not the ideal description for the Jil Sander ethos that remains with the company long after she loosened her grip and left in 2013, any more than the word ‘minimalist’. (‘My eyes respond to a smart, modern style in dressing. I am alert to anything out of tune: the wrong colour, shape or proportion.’) Here is another word frequently applied to Sander as much as that trio of designers (Yamamoto, Miyake, Kawakubo) who also made headway in the 1980s and scaled monumental heights from the 1990s onwards, decades after Sander established her eponymous label. But The Word Modern is a start. It brings to mind tidy variants that are welcome, to her, and those of us who, like her, have embraced minimalism from our formative years to now. Modernity. Modernism. Modern.

We live among old words as we live among ruins. Certain words become old because they are exhausted, particularly those, ’diversity’ for instance, used as shorthand for the contemporary. ‘Radical’ and ‘progressive’ are two more. They fail us. The modern, the new and the future were once interchangeable but in the midst of the technological revolution that overwhelms us we exist in a post-future world, as all tomorrow continues to offer arrives today via apps and promises. Modern therefore returns - Welcome! - meaning something beyond the shock of the new. There’s a hint of the classic and the traditional; of standards. Possibly the best from the past merging with the best of the present, incorporating nuances and subtle changes that reflect shifting trends but do not ape them. This is where Jil Sander came in. This is what makes her modern. She has a simple way of putting it that removes the slack from my previous paragraphs: ‘My aesthetic ideas develop out of what I sense from the zeitgeist. What interests me is the new, the emerging.’

There is little in the Sander archive. She doesn’t favour vintage or retro, and tellingly, a bystander pointed out that her ancient runway shows resist being ‘old’. In her words: ‘You can develop new fashions that seem ‘timelessly modern’ and nonetheless look old after a while. Our eyes are good at distinguishing what’s familiar from what’s new.’ There are the staples of a wardrobe - shirts, trousers, skirts, jackets, coats - and there are the amendments that transform these items from classic to contemporary: the length of a hem, the cut of a cuff. According to Sander the principles in perfection are common to all ages, as are those of proportion and symmetry. What changes are the parameters of fashion. In one of her rare interviews this came up, from the lips of the interviewer. The focus, when it comes to fashion, is ‘no longer on modernity.’ But it was the day ‘Jil Sander’ began.

Perhaps more than any other decade, apart form the current one, the 1960s was obsessed with the pursuit of the new. This is something she witnessed, leaving her native Hamburg in 1963, aged 18, for two years of study in California. But her major influences were established elsewhere, back in Germany, and those synonymous with minimalism and modernism, and a distinctly European movement that evolved throughout the twentieth century. Her ‘craftsmanship’ is credited to her studying textiles as an engineer rather than a designer. Her angle as a designer owes a debt to architecture and particularly the Bauhaus movement. The ideology of key figures associated with it was central to the curriculum at the German technical college she attended, where original students of the original masters were now the teachers. Their philosophy was initially related to the creation of buildings. It moved into other areas, but didn’t arrive at fashion until the 1990s. Yes, this is where Jil Sander came into her own, with a method inspired by the pioneers of all things modern from that earlier age. There was Adolf Loos who believed that freedom from ornament was a sign of spiritual strength (‘Don’t be afraid of being unfashionable.’) The famous ‘Less is more’ mantra of Mies van der Rohe, and the father of the Bauhaus movement, Walter Gropius (‘Limitation makes the creative mind inventive.’) Ornamentation and ostentation were problematic for Sander. Restraint was more fitting. She attributes this to her heritage: ‘My roots are in the Bauhaus movement, which applied functional rationality to the design of practical everyday life. Streamlined beauty, clear structures, reduction to the essential and free movement. But functional rationality is only the backbone of my work. I always look for contemporary forms of sophistication and sensual simplicity. I want fashion to be liberating in a subtle way.’

Even in the 1960s when liberation was a word on the lips of the young and the radical, she had an alternate take. She didn’t embrace the excess but she did acknowledge the revolutionary mood that was thought to be in the air. Her rebellion materialised in clothes that had not been previously available to women and, as supporters quickly pointed out, empowered them. Before launching her label, she was an editor on fashion magazines, while her first official foray into fashion was as the owner of a boutique in the city of her birth. Inspiration came via foreign trips to London, and excursions to King’s Road.

The word ‘boutique’ brings snapshots from that era, along with words and trends that went the way of all flesh and fashion. Put together the numbers 1-9-6-8, and for those of us of a certain generation, younger than Sander, but old enough to have had the gift of speech a picture forms of a past that’s not as fantastical as the future struck us at the time: Revolting students. Wars. The assassination of a King and a Kennedy. An attempt on Andy Warhol’s life by Valerie Solanas, author of the S.C.U.M manifesto (The Society For Cutting Up Men). Fashion was orbiting around the futuristic under the captaincy of Paco Rabanne, André Courrèges and Pierre Cardin. Richard Hamilton’s minimalist cover for The Beatles White Album was in record racks by the autumn, and more in keeping with the Jil Sander aesthetic than the space age apparel of the fashion futurists, a year before the moon landings.

The fantasy was fading, along with free love. Women were getting a raw deal on this and many fronts. Some of them, without taking a leaf out of the Solanas pamphlet, gravitated towards the women’s movement and feminism by the 1970s. Again, here is a word assigned to Jil Sander: ‘the first feminist of fashion’. Words fail us, yet this is one she warmed to at times (‘I never thought of myself as a feminist, but maybe I was, since I was not happy with the way women presented themselves’), and backed away from at others (‘I like femininity. Not of the devout, but of the self-assured, cool and sophisticated kind’). An interesting word in the current climate, now seemingly an anachronism, is one she used about herself: ‘I always had this androgynous feeling inside, but never at the expense of killing the feminine part of a woman.’ On another occasion she mused: ‘I think my work was more about the rapprochement of the sexes and a more androgynous look for men and women.’ The Word Feminism remains with us, but those that define themselves by it are split on agreeing on what constitutes a women. For one faction, biological men now meet the criteria. When Sander was young, feminists were determined to escape the shackles of The Word Girl, and much of what gender imposed. ‘I have always sought clothing that brings us sympathy as human beings,’ Sander recalled in recent years, ‘and emphasises our personalities rather than our sexual preferences, however varied they may be.’

Like the word ‘boutique’ the word ‘androgyny’ conjures up another age. One in which Jil Sander momentarily broke from her self-imposed sartorial rules, and became a dedicated follower of fashion by forking out for a snakeskin maxi coat from Ossie Clark. Put the numbers 1-9-7-3 together - the year Sander launched her first collection - and those of us of a certain generation, younger than Sander, but old enough to have teetered on platform shoes while wearing flares that flapped like flags in a storm, recall how the rules on gender, sexuality and fashion were being circumnavigated. Presently, such diversions are central to the cultural orthodoxy, yet words used to define them are old, tired and put us back among the ruins. Back then they were new, radical, progressive and modern.

Jil Sander made her Paris runway debut the season the September issue of US Vogue announced: 'If you were around a hundred years from now and wanted a definitive picture of the American look in 1975 you’d study Calvin Klein’. Sander has often been placed in the company of that aforementioned trio of Japanese designers, along with Helmut Lang and Yves Saint Laurent. Early on Calvin Klein was described as an American YSL, but CK and JS have other things in common. They each started their labels the same year. Klein visited Paris runway shows and began to import some sophisticated, elegant European restraint to the American market. Sander returned to Europe from California and New York with the optimism, scope and rebellion that was lacking on her home turf at the time.

In August 2017, I contributed an essay to POP on Calvin Klein in response to Raf Simons becoming the company’s creative director the previous year (Simons fulfilled the same role at Jil Sander between 2005 and 2012, during one of her breaks from the company). I wrote: ‘The minimalism was evident during his apprenticeship years: the lack of ornamentation, the muted palette (fifty shades of beige). The designs were architectural and constructed in harsh fabrics. Yet casual, with an emphasis on separates as they were called - beginning with coats, moving swiftly into sportswear - rather than the standard single outfit. There was a forensic attention to detail and even more revealing of the man himself, a rigorous pursuit of perfection. The search for the perfect colour, the perfect cut, the perfect image. In the 1980s, when the ingredient of sensuality was added to the mix, he came close to capturing the elusive grail.’ If you erase the word beige, I could almost be writing about Jil Sander.

Like Klein, Sander understood the significance of branding and the imagery crucial to the campaigns that promoted the clothes and the company name. Working with notable photographers on powerful campaigns was another thing she shared with Klein, and something she took on as a fashion editor. There was also The Word Minimalism. John Pawson, the architect behind Klein’s flagship store on New York’s Fifth Avenue in 1995, laid bare his manifesto in the book ‘Minimum’ three years later. He writes: ‘The minimum is the perfection that an artefact achieves when it is no longer possible to improve on it by subtraction.’ In 2018, a Jil Sander store designed by Pawson opened in Tokyo.

This century, the one that modernists and futurists had set their sights, minimalism has become a luxury lifestyle choice for the super rich, particularly tech entrepreneurs. Some have adopted it in the cause of sustainability; to distance themselves from the consumption of the masses. Having made their millions they now want everything those that remained poor have: nothing. But it’s a wealthy, stylistic, elitist version of nothing. Perhaps what historian Thomas Macaulay referred to as ‘extravagant austerity’ when describing the Puritans. In the 1930s one Richard Clegg advanced his philosophy on ‘voluntary simplicity’, which is equally fitting. This trend further echoes the European modernists Sander favoured as they had specific ideas of how the common herd should live. For the super rich minimalism remains a cosmetic exercise. That’s not to say these billionaires don’t have rituals as keepers of the faith. The credo of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is in keeping with the stance of Walter Gropius (‘constraint inspires creativity’). Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, insisted on always wearing the same Issey Miyake polo neck. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, forever in the same style of t-shirt, embraces sartorial minimalism to liberate himself from unnecessary decisions.

Jil Sander has one item of clothing she returns to, and retains in her wardrobe: the perfect white t-shirt in Egyptian cotton. ‘Whatever we create has to be really special. It has to have emotional value, underlining the rational behind the minimalist approach,’ she says ‘It has to be something you want to have for your whole life.’ In 2017, at a retrospective of her work in Frankfurt, the show’s curator said of her stores: ‘All her shelves, displays, and window sills were always angular, so nobody could put anything private on it. It was all focused on the work.’ But minimalism moves beyond this for Sander, it’s ‘a mental exercise in pure living and clearing our mind scape.’

Equally, she acknowledged the maximalism that went into creating the simplicity of her collections, and the variety of inspirations that have contributed to her approach. Just as there was the industrial themes of the German architects, there was and is nature (‘Nature has always played an important role in my design, because I wanted to give a leading role to the different natures of the people wearing my designs.’) Sander was born in a military hospital outside the city of Hamburg, amid the ruins, rubble and destruction of World War II. She returned to the city at the age of two, and from early on in her formative years became something of an Anglophile, with the English country garden central to this fixation. Not least of all that which was created in Kent by Virginia Woolf’s erstwhile amour, Vita Sackville-West. ‘I dream of Sissinghurst,’ Sander has said, rather like the second Mrs de Winter dreaming of Manderley in Rebecca.

Like the Anglophilia, the fixation on men’s tailoring has stayed with her, because of what it conceals as well as what it reveals - the hidden linings and labels: ’I like it very much when clothing harbours those sorts of secrets’. Her designs have revealed these inconspicuous details, in stormy weather and winter winds. The gold plating on the inside collar of a coat, for instance. Yet, here, there and everywhere, again and again, The Word Minimalism doesn’t cover it - the vision, the philosophy, the craftsmanship, long after she mapped out a different route for herself (consultancy beckoned after buy-outs and fall-outs brought comings and goings in the early years of the century). For Sander, this word is ‘too cool, too lacking in emotion’. The word she favours is ‘pure’. The name of her label’s original perfume, and a word she has returned to when pushed to explain herself and consider her legacy: ‘I felt justified in my instincts to reduce and concentrate on well-executed, pure forms.’ The Word Pure, like The Word Modern still doesn’t entirely do her justice, but again, it’s a start. It’s the best she’s got as, ultimately, words fail her, as they fail all of us.