Bonaveri Magazine

“Strong and pure” are the adjectives Jil Sander
herself has used to define her fashion and also
her way of life (and her choices). Few colours,
pure lines and “cuts made by the knife”. Along
with the avant-garde of Japanese designers
such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto, Jil
Sander has turned Western aesthetics upside
down while evoking also her German culture.
Born in 1943, in Wesselburen in the
neighbourhood of Hamburg, Germany, as
Heidemarie Jiline Sander, she was the middle
child of three siblings. A few years later, the
family moved to Hamburg and Jil Sander
studied textile engineering, meeting teachers
who introduced her to the Bauhaus movement,
which had been outlawed under National
Socialism. At the age of 19 she moved to Los
Angeles to finish up her education there as an
exchange student. She also started working as
a journalist.
“The women to
whom I think of
when I design
are very aware of
themselves and selfconfident”.
When she returned to Hamburg in the mid
60s she worked as a fashion editor for several
women’s magazines. What she saw and was
asked to photograph did not correspond to
her ideas of fashion; it did not match her
vision of proportion and material, nor her
image of women, or her intuitions about the
seismographic shifts in the aesthetic demands
of a rapidly advancing society.
Her aesthetics lies in a strict proportional
relationship of form, material and colour.
Her woman is bright, independent, resourceful.
“The women whom I think of when I design are very
aware of themselves and self-confident”. Jil Sander’s
reforming voice was unimpressed by fashion’s
dictates and the customary boundaries of prêt-àporter
and couture. With rigour on the one hand and
an obsessive research of quality in materials on the
other, she shaped a new vestimentary language and a
new way of dressing.
Her first distinctive moment arrived in 1968 when
she opened her own store in Hamburg: the line she
designed, called Jil Sander was marked by subdued
colours and formal severity and sold out in a flash.
While eccentric styles flourished in Paris, her minimalist
audacity was a breath of fresh air.
“If you wear Jil Sander,” she herself once said, “you
are not fashionable, you are modern.”
Jil Sander invites women to free themselves from
decorative details. Opulence with her is to be found
in the three-dimensionality of the cut, in exquisite
craftsmanship and in the material. The look
nevertheless remains purist.
Her definition of beauty: “You cannot produce beauty
just for itself. Beauty is created when all the parts are
in relationship to each other. I feel that aesthetics and
ethics have an equal say in beauty.”
In 1973, the label Jil Sander was born, expanding
in success and range of products season after
season. After several runway shows in Paris,
Jil Sander decided to present her collections in
Milano, a city that seemed to perfectly fit her
personality and taste.
It is always the material that remains at the
centre of Jil Sander’s attention. She devotes
herself intensely to its development and
research, imports state-of-the-art high-tech
weaves from Japan and works with Italian
producers on the research of new fabrics with
sculptural tractability. Materials and techniques
that do not exist in Europe must be invented
anew, or traced back to remote locations of the
world.
Not only fashion and accessories, but also
architecture, interior, sound design, photography
and cosmetics… Jil Sander imparted her vision
and insight overseeing many creative field and
projects. A true lover of contemporary art, she
is collector and a promoter of art exhibitions.
Magazines and interviews have described her
as a crossroads of opposites: creative and
methodic, fragile and full of energy at the same
time, determined and reserved.
In 2014 the last Jil Sander collection designed
by herself went on stage.
From Hamburg, where she lives at present,
she has demonstrated a gracious availability
to recall for us her encounter and collaboration
with Bonaveri, that led her to partner with us in
the solo exhibition “Jil Sander: Present Tense”
held at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in
Frankfurt in 2017.
We are in the 80s, you saw the Bonaveri
advertisement in VOGUE ITALIA and you
contacted the company… and here began a
long-time partnership… right? What year was
it exactly?
I can’t remember the exact year nor the
advertisement, but we certainly have HAD a
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