Jil Sander

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Jil Sander brand corporate logo
Jil Sander store, Neuer Wall , Hamburg (2015)

Heidemarie Jiline "Jil" Sander (born November 27, 1943 in Hedwigenkoog ) is a German fashion designer . She has been known since the 1980s for her elegant and high-priced fashion for women, which was described as clear and timeless, and since 1997 also for men, as well as for her cosmetics line. Alongside Karl Lagerfeld and Wolfgang Joop , Sander is one of the few internationally renowned fashion designers in Germany. Because of her minimalist, simple designs and her preference for luxurious fabrics, she received nicknames such as " Queen of less ", and " Kashmir Queen ".

In 1968 Sander founded the company and with it the Jil Sander brand in Hamburg . After difficult early years, which were overcome with a lucrative perfume license, an IPO in 1989 and internationally successful times in the 1990s, Sander sold the now globally active company to the Prada Group in mid-1999 as part of expansion plans and left the company in April of the year 2000. After a brief return as head designer in 2003, she gave up her post again at the end of 2004. After a five-year absence from the fashion world, Sander developed the low-priced + J design line from 2009 to the end of 2011 as creative director at the Japanese fashion chain Uniqlo . In February 2012, Sander returned to the company she had founded almost 44 years earlier, which was sold by Prada in 2006 and now belonged to a Japanese textile company, as creative director, only to leave it again in October 2013.

Career and company history

Early years

Sander was born in Hedwigenkoog's air force hospital in 1943, spent a few years in Heide (Holstein) and eventually grew up in Hamburg. After studying textile engineering at the State Textile Engineering School in Krefeld (now affiliated with the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences ), she went to Los Angeles as an exchange student and attended the University College there. In New York City she then worked for the women's magazine McCall's . After two years, she returned to her hometown in 1963 to work as a fashion editor for various women's magazines ( Constanze and Petra ).

In 1967, the then 24-year-old opened a black-lacquered fashion boutique in the Pöseldorf district of Hamburg under the name Jil Sander , for which she had sold her car and taken out a loan of DM 200,000 from the Dresdner Bank . She founded Jil Sander GmbH in 1968 and from 1974 sold her own collections alongside fashion by Sonia Rykiel , Thierry Mugler and others. Sander's original idea was to have simple clothing produced in large margins in India according to the motto 'good design for little money' . After failing with this idea, she changed her concept to high quality clothing in small numbers. A presentation of her purist fashion in Paris in 1975, at a time of opulent, colorful fashion, met with little enthusiasm. It was not until 1976 that she achieved the international breakthrough with the so-called onion look , which consisted of many individual parts made of high-quality materials that could be combined with one another and found recognition especially among working women from the beginning of the 1980s.

In 1979, in cooperation with the cosmetics manufacturer Lancaster (since 1996 Coty ) , Sander expanded her product range to include the Jil Sander Woman Pure fragrance and care series , which she advertised for years with her own portrait - initially for cost reasons and finally to signal to the consumer that she stand behind their products. The lucrative perfume license and the associated advertising enabled the company to expand. The first men's perfume, Jil Sander Man Pure , followed in 1981. Jil Sander Cosmetics achieved sales of 15 million DM in 1981. At the beginning of the 1980s, perfume by Jil Sander took fourth place in western Germany behind the Estée Lauder Companies , Lancôme and Chanel . Since then, numerous fragrances for women and men - including classics such as Jil Sander Sun (1989), Jil Sander No. 4 (1990) or Sander for Men (1998) - launched , of which some were reinstated.

International expansion

In the 1980s - a time when simple, reserved fashion and subtle colors were rarely present on the international catwalks - Sander presented her collections at the Milan fashion shows in order to better reach the international audience. With fashion alone, the company made a turnover of 20 million marks in 1981. From 1983 to 1985 she was a university teacher in the field of fashion design and headed the fashion class at the University of Applied Arts Vienna ; her predecessor there had been Karl Lagerfeld. In 1989 she converted her GmbH into a stock corporation and was one of the first to list the fashion company on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange .

In the early 1990s, the fashion propagated by the international catwalks became more androgynous and more discreet than in the 1980s . Sander was ten years ahead of her time with her purist-minimalist, on average quite opulent designs. The supermodels that Sander sent down the Milan catwalk in delicate and simple creations looked so elf-like that the saying “ Jil Sander is hot, Armani not. “Established and the company's sales figures rose steadily. Jil Sander's presence with numerous stores has been greatly expanded, especially in Asia. Elegant flagship stores have sprung up in Tokyo , Hong Kong and Taipei , and Sander personally helped design them in collaboration with renowned architects such as Michael Gabellini . In 1993 a flagship store was added on Avenue Montaigne in Paris. The 1990s are considered the heyday of the Jil Sander brand.

In 1992 the designer Roberto Menichetti was hired as Sander's assistant for the women's collection. The collaboration between Jil Sander and Puma goes back to his and Sander's designs from 1996 - the designer sneaker King was first presented in 1996, the Easy Rider model followed in 1997. Sander had already designed his own sports shoe for women and was the first luxury in 1996 -Fashion designer entered into a cooperation with a sporting goods manufacturer. For Puma, at that time trying to change its image, this meant the beginning of a whole series of collaborations with fashion houses of the upper genre. In 1997 Jil Sander started the men's fashion collection. Menichetti also contributed these designs. The launch of Jil Sander men's fashion - in the usual simple style - had been postponed repeatedly by Sander in the years before. Men's fashion soon contributed around 20 percent to group sales.

Sale and withdrawal

In 1999 the Italian group Prada bought 75 percent of the ordinary shares and 15 percent of the preference shares of Jil Sander AG for an estimated 275 million DM. Sander had been looking for a joint venture to increase the share of accessories. In 2000, she surprisingly gave up her position as CEO of the company headed by Prada boss Patrizio Bertelli , but in May 2003 she took over responsibility for design in the company again. Bertelli had appointed the former Gucci designer Milan Vukmirovic to succeed Sander, whose designs she has now revised. Under Vukmirovic's design leadership, long-standing fans were pissed off with commercial collections and not enough new customers were gained. The company has been in the red since 2001. Sander's designs of the two following seasons received praise from the press and enthusiastically received by buyers. Her return to the company was accompanied by a four percent increase in sales. However, the company still posted a deficit of 17 million euros. In November 2004, Sander left the company she had founded again. Sander and Bertelli could not find a common line regarding the strategic direction of the company.

In the spring of 2005, Prada announced that the Belgian men's fashion designer Raf Simons would be head designer of all collections at Jil Sander. On May 5, 2005, Jil Sander AG reported another loss of 29.6 million euros for the 2004 financial year, despite a cost-cutting program in which the Hamburg showroom was closed and the entire production facility was transferred to Italy failed to get House Jil Sander on course. In February 2006, Prada sold Jil Sander to British financial investor Change Capital Partners (CCP) for an estimated 120 million euros. Change Capital not only took over the Jil Sander brand, but also the management team and designer Simons, who made his design debut at Jil Sander in mid-2005 with the men's collection for spring 2006 and, as a result, especially with the women's collections for his interpretations of the Sander Erbes was praised by the press. In late 2006, the IPO lifted the Jil Sander AG of CCP. In October 2008 Change Capital Partners sold its shares in Jil Sander for 167 million euros to the Japanese company Onward Holdings Co. and its European subsidiary Gibo Co. Since then, the company has operated within the Onward Holdings Group as Jil Sander SpA, based in Milan, and as Jil Sander KK based in Tokyo.

Return and farewell

Design for Uniqlo 2011

After a five-year absence, Sander reappeared in the fashion world in spring 2009. As the creative director of the clothing chain Uniqlo of the Japanese fashion group Fast Retailing , she designed a fashion collection called + J for women and men in the typical Sander style for almost three years , albeit in the lower price segment, albeit the prices above those of the other Uniqlo range lay. The collections were not available in Germany. In March 2011 the + J collection for the autumn / winter 2010 season received the Brit Insurance Design Award in the Fashion category, which is presented by the Design Museum London and is one of the most prestigious design awards. The collaboration with Uniqlo ended in autumn 2011.

On February 28, 2012, Sander returned to the company she had founded as creative director. Onward Holdings had previously terminated the collaboration with the Belgian Raf Simons as creative director at Jil Sander by mutual agreement. Sander presented the first collection after her return at the men's fashion shows in Milan at the end of June 2012. Critics praised her men's fashion designs for “the art of cut […,] colors, shapes and materials” and generally recognized that Sander was still “in the premier league of international designers ". Sander's first women's collection since her return was presented in Milan in late September 2012 and received positive reviews. In autumn 2013 Sander turned his back on her company again. According to her own statements, she took this step for family reasons.

In April 2014, Onward Holdings appointed the Italian Rodolfo Paglialunga, a former Prada women's fashion designer and chief designer at Vionnet from 2009 to 2011 , as Jil Sander's new creative director. Paglialunga left the company in spring 2017. In April 2017, Jil Sander appointed designer couple Lucie and Luke Meier as the brand's creative directors. From 2016 Sander prepared her first museum exhibition ("Jil Sander. Present"), which opened at the beginning of November 2017 at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main and will be shown until May 2018.

Key figures

At the beginning of 2011, the company Jil Sander announced without giving any concrete figures that after a ten-year loss phase in the 2010 financial year, among other things, due to the women's second line Jil Sander Navy, which was introduced to a wider audience, they were back in the black. Most recently, sales of 100 million euros were reported for the 2008/09 financial year.

In 2011 there were 23 Jil Sander stores worldwide and around 35 shops-in-shops in larger stores. In 2010, the company's own online shop was launched, which generated 3.5% of total sales. For the film I Am Love (2009), which was nominated for an Oscar in the category Best Costume Design in 2011 , Raf Simons created the outfits of the leading actress Tilda Swinton for the Jil Sander brand .

Collections

  • Jil Sander - high-priced women's fashion collection and accessories, since 1974; presented at the Milan fashion shows
  • Jil Sander - high-priced men's fashion collection and accessories, since 1997; presented at the Milan fashion shows
  • Jil Sander Navy - fashionable second line of women's fashion in the upper middle price segment, since 2010; Showed on the sidelines of New York Fashion Week in 2012

style

Trademarks of Jil Sander are a trouser suit that is strongly tailored to the body proportions, an unlined blazer, as well as a simple trench coat or camel hair-colored coat and a simple white blouse. No unnecessary details are used here. Critics spoke appreciatively of cool, Hanseatic, even Protestant reduced chic. Jil Sander Mode stood for "understatement, modern simplicity and timeless elegance" with clear, no-frills lines. The materials are characterized - at least under Sander's leadership - by their very high quality: "The very finest silk, the best cloth, the most precious cashmere are just good enough." The dominant colors are black, gray, white, beige, brown and dark blue. The men's fashion introduced in 1997 follows the same principles.

At the beginning of the 1980s, Sander fashion was essentially a reversal of Dior's new look - namely a departure from playful, ladylike fashion with wide dresses and skirts and instead a turn to functional men's clothing-inspired, elegant women's fashion for career women, who began with it at this time To conquer leadership positions. In times of brightly colored women's fashion propagated by the Parisian catwalks in exuberant cuts and unusual material combinations including wide shoulders, the simple, high-quality fashion designs by the perfectionist Jil Sander were tantamount to a revolution and initially brought the company moderate sales figures. For Sander, the "three-dimensional silhouette, the armholes, the lapel edge or the folds" were central elements of her designs. The fact that their fashion could be combined with each other and with the fashion of other designers made Sander famous as the inventor of the "onion look". She herself sees her aesthetics rooted in the Bauhaus tradition, refers in her purist fashion to "clever cuts that give the wearer space and dynamism" and speaks of "fashion as a protective coat of emancipation" in relation to her designs.

Private

Sander spent her early childhood years in the chaos of war in Dithmarschen . Her mother had lived in Hamburg, but came from Dithmarschen and fled to relatives in the country during the war . Sander's parents divorced early. Her older sister Ingrid stayed with her biological father, Walter Sander. Her younger brother and Sander grew up in Hamburg from 1951 on with their mother, Erna-Anna Sander, and their new partner and their son Heino. Sander's stepfather, the Hamburg car dealer Erich Libuda, with whom she was very familiar, died in the early 1960s. Sander's mother died in 2009 at the age of 93.

From 1978 to 2000 Sander lived in a villa on the Alster in the Hamburg district of Rotherbaum . Then she moved first to the Rotherbaum district, and finally to her partner Angelica 'Dickie' Mommsen, who she had known since the early 1980s, to Gut Ruhleben near Plön in Schleswig-Holstein. Mommsen died of cancer in 2014 at the age of 72 and left three sons from his first marriage. Sander also has residences in Berlin-Charlottenburg and Ibiza .

Sander is considered shy and reserved. Her hobbies counts gardening . Despite her success, the designer is known for her simple, reserved appearance. Except for a Rolex wristwatch, she wears no jewelry.

Honors (selection)

Exhibitions

Web links

Commons : Jil Sander  - collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Jil Sander  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Queen of Omission sueddeutsche.de, November 27, 2013
  2. ↑ "Queen of Less" - Jil Sander starts comeback ( Memento from February 28, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), ftd.de, February 28, 2012.
  3. ^ Portrait of Jil Sander - Die Kashmir-Queen , augsburger-allgemeine.de, February 27, 2012.
  4. ^ Brand without a head , spiegel.de, January 31, 2000
  5. ↑ Jil Sander - Abtritt , faz.net, November 17, 2004.
  6. ↑ Jil Sander stops at Uniqlo , faz.net, June 23, 2011.
  7. ↑ Elegant and confident - "Queen of Less" Jil Sander returns , weser-kurier.de, February 25, 2012.
  8. ↑ After a short comeback: Jil Sander leaves Jil Sander , focus.de, October 24, 2013.
  9. ^ Dithmarscher Legenden faz.net, November 26, 2013
  10. ↑ "Fashion does not have the same status as it used to" welt.de, October 26, 2015
  11. ↑ "I want to shake things up. Take a closer look" spiegel.de, June 29, 1986
  12. ↑ "I want to shake things up. Take a closer look" spiegel.de, June 29, 1986
  13. ↑ Bein am Boden spiegel.de, March 29, 1982
  14. ↑ Bein am Boden spiegel.de, March 29, 1982
  15. ↑ Professional - Jil Sander , spiegel.de, November 4, 1983.
  16. ↑ Portrait of Jil Sander fashion designer: “You have to have a sense for the effortless” , tagesspiegel.de, March 25, 2009.
  17. ↑ Biografia menichetti.com, accessed: April 12, 2018
  18. ↑ The Queen of Less frieze.com, January 18, 2018
  19. ↑ Medicine Man Mode stern.de, April 13, 2005
  20. ↑ Medicine Man Mode stern.de, April 13, 2005
  21. ^ Brand without a head , spiegel.de, January 31, 2000.
  22. ↑ Jil Sander leaves the stock exchange  ( page no longer available , search in web archives ), fashionunited.com, September 8, 2006.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.fashionunited.de
  23. ↑ Jil Sander for Uniqlo: Collection is called + J , textilwirtschaft.de, July 8, 2009.
  24. ^ Brit Insurance Designs 2011 , designmuseum.org, March 15, 2011
  25. ↑ Fashion designer Jil Sander is 70 , ndr.de, November 27, 2013.
  26. ↑ welt.de Jil Sander is Jil Sander again , welt.de, February 26, 2012.
  27. ↑ Jil Sander is back - Dior to the power of two , faz.net, February 23, 2012.
  28. ↑ Raf Simons leaves Jil Sander ( memento from April 19, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), glamour.de, February 23, 2012.
  29. ↑ Jil Sander is Jil Sander again , manager-magazin.de, June 25, 2005.
  30. ↑ Queen of Omission sueddeutsche.de, November 27, 2013
  31. ↑ Fashion comeback in Milan - Jil Sander inspires women , spiegel.de, September 22, 2012.
  32. ↑ Milan Fashion: Strong appearances by Jil Sander and Marni , focus.de, 23 September 2012.
  33. ↑ JJil Sander mourns his partner "Dickie" Mommsen , Hamburger Abendblatt, June 7, 2014 (accessed June 7, 2014).
  34. ↑ Successor found for Jil Sander ( Memento from February 14, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), textilwirtschaft.de, April 29, 2014.
  35. ↑ Rodolfo Paglialunga leaves Jil Sander vogue.de, March 15, 2017
  36. ↑ Jil Sander appoints Lucie and Luke Meier as new creative directors welt.de, April 7, 2017
  37. ↑ Frankfurter Museum MAK presents fashion icon Jil Sander ( Memento from April 12, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) hessenschau.de, November 2, 2017
  38. ↑ Hanseatic presentation of quality zeit.de, November 14, 2017
  39. ↑ North German icon of purism and “Queen of less” goethe.de, May 2014
  40. ↑ Queen of Simplicity swr.de, February 7, 2018
  41. ↑ Bein am Boden spiegel.de, March 29, 1982
  42. ^ Unbroken hanseatisch zeit.de, February 27, 2012
  43. ↑ More Jil Sander would do Modewelt well swr.de, November 21, 2017
  44. ↑ Designer returns - Jil Sander, the Queen of Objectivity , welt.de, February 26, 2012.
  45. ↑ More Jil Sander would do Modewelt well swr.de, November 21, 2017
  46. ^ Silent revolutionary handelsblatt.com, September 1, 2008
  47. ^ The return of Jil Sander, Abendblatt.de, May 22, 2003
  48. ↑ Jil Sander Bathes in the Glow of Uniqlo nytimes.com, June 7, 2010
  49. ↑ Former Jil-Sander-Villa for sale, Abendblatt.de, December 11, 2016
  50. ↑ Jil Sander: The biography of the fashion designer vip.de, December 11, 2015
  51. ↑ Son of her deceased partner thanks designer focus.de, June 8, 2014
  52. ↑ Celebrated worldwide - and yet almost invisible, Abendblatt.de, November 27, 2008
  53. ↑ Also fits today faz.net, November 3, 2017
  54. ↑ "I want to shake things up. Take a closer look" spiegel.de, June 29, 1986
  55. ^ Honorary member of the DDC 2012: Jil Sander. (No longer available online.) Deutscher Designer Club e. V., archived from the original on January 16, 2014 ; accessed on January 15, 2014 .
  56. ↑ Jil Sander receives award for her life's work: Queen of Simplicity ( Memento from April 12, 2018 in the Internet Archive ) ardmediathek.de, February 7, 2018
  57. ↑ Exhibition Jil Sander Present from November 4, 2017 - May 6, 2018 ( Memento from November 7, 2017 in the Internet Archive ), museumangewandtekunst.de (accessed December 15, 2017)
personal data
SURNAME Sander, Jil
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sander, Heidemarie Jiline (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German fashion designer
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH Hedwigenkoog