FRANKFURT.- Jil Sander is one of the most influential fashion designers of her generation. Her first solo exhibition ever to take place in a museum consists of large-scale, multi-media installations and tableaus devoted to the impact of her design approach on the aesthetics, material and form of fashion and product design, architecture and garden art. The presentation, which could hardly be more multifaceted, showcases the ingenuity and creative power of a designer whose primary objective is to bring out a person’s personality.

Jil Sander’s significance as a fashion designer is due to an extraordinary perceptivity which enabled her to anticipate trends and changes in society. She used them as a point of departure for developing unexpected, truly modern shapes in fashion. Her purism has transformed our notions of beauty and identity. Her design principles — harmony of proportion, sophisticated three-dimensionality, understatement and dynamic elegance — have always remained the same. And yet she has presented the fundamentals of her aesthetics in each of her collections in completely new ways.

With her decision to exhibit her work at the Museum Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt/Main, Jil Sander has turned her attention to the past. This
is quite a new experience for someone who has always preferred the up-and-coming. After an eighteen months long, intensive involvement of the designer, the exhibition opens as a multimedia spectacle, combining architecture, colour, light, film, sound, text, photography, fashion and art in dynamic spatial compositions. As such, the exhibition is less a retrospective overview than a fresh interpretation of the Jil Sander spirit and its aesthetics.

Curated by Matthias Wagner K in close cooperation with Jil Sander, the exhibition is divided into the following thematic sections: runway, backstage, studio, fashion lines, accessories, cosmetics, fashion photography and advertising campaigns, fashion and art, architecture and garden art. It spreads throughout the museum building on some 3,000 square metres of exhibition space.

Jil Sander was born in Wesselburen in Schleswig-Holstein on 27 November 1943 as Heidemarie Jiline Sander. On leaving secondary school, Jil Sander studies textile engineering at the Krefeld Textile School of Engineering. In 1964 she goes to Los Angeles as an exchange student. In the mid-1960s she returns to Hamburg to work as a fashion editor for various women’s magazines. What she sees and is asked to photograph does not correspond with her ideas of fashion. It doesn’t correspond with her understanding of proportion and material, nor with her image of women, or her intuitions as to the seismographic shifts in the aesthetic demands of a rapidly advancing society. She therefore begins designing fashion herself; her creations are distinguished by subdued colours and formal rigour. She first presents them in 1973 at the prêt-à-porter shop she has opened five years earlier in the Pöseldorf district of Hamburg. In 1979 the designer undertakes the development of her own perfume and bodycare product lines, starting with Jil Sander Woman Pure and Jil Sander Man Pure. These fragrances – as well as Jil Sander Sun, launched in 1989 – become classics.

In contrast to the typical Parisian couture aesthetics, Jil Sander refers to German concepts of modernity. Her aesthetics go back to the Bauhaus vision of joining craftsmanship and industrial production. She supports teamwork, enlightened seriality, prototype art as well as easily comprehensible and accessible structures. Even the ideas of German Classicism find reflections in her work. What Goethe called ‘style’, differentiating it from simple imitation and mannerism, returns in Jil Sander’s concept of purism. In her campaign photography she is inspired by the art of graphic reduction typical for Neue Sachlichkeit.

Jil Sander’s design leads, by way of new cutting, weaving, processing and manufacturing techniques, to a new vestimentary language, a new way of dressing. It is always the material itself that remains at the centre of Jil Sander’s attention. She devotes herself intensively to the research of fabrics, imports state-of-the-art high-tech weaves from Japan and works with Italian producers on the development of new materials with sculptural tractability. Materials and techniques that cannot be found in Europe must be invented anew, or traced back to remote locations of the world.

Since the 1980s Jil Sander presents her collections twice
a year at the Milan Fashion Week. Due to her overwhelming success, in 1989, she converts her private company into a public limited company which is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

Jil Sander invites women to free themselves from the decorative. Opulence with her is to be found in the three-dimensionality of the cut, in exquisite craftsmanship and in the material. The exterior nevertheless remains purist. Beginning in 1997, Jil Sander designs for men, too: clothes, which accentuate the natural physique by way of innovative fabrics and new sartorial methods involving horsehair and canvas inlays. “If you wear Jil Sander” she once said, “you are not fashionable, you are modern”.

An internationally successful luxury brand needs a strong team. Jil Sander succeeds time and again in inspiring others with her concepts. Early on, she collaborates with Jürgen Scholz and his agency Scholz & Friends. With Peter Schmidt she develops flacons as well as her iconic brand logo. For the campaign photography – so crucial in fashion – she recruits photographers such as Peter Lindbergh, Irving Penn, David Sims, Nick Knight, Craig McDean, Mario Sorrenti and Jean-François Lepage. For her fashion shows she engages the French composer and sound artist Frédéric Sanchez from her autumn/winter show 1991/92 onward. In 1993, in collaboration with the American architect Michael Gabellini, Jil Sander builds her first 1,000-square-metre flagship store in Paris at unprecedented expense; the establishment at 50 Avenue Montaigne serves as a trendsetter for the entire industry. Branches in major cities such as New York, Paris, London and Tokyo follow. Worldwide more than one hundred ‘shop-in-shops’ are set-up.

Once her brand has been integrated into the Italian fashion company Prada, Jil Sander once again writes history with her +J collections for the worldwide Japanese clothing chain Uniqlo. The motto of her fashion line is “Luxury in simplicity, purity in design, beauty and comfort for all”. With her feather-light use of down, she initiates a new trend.

In 2012 Jil Sander returns to the eponymous brand as creative director, a position from which she retires two years later for personal reasons. The brand name JIL SANDER is now owned by the Japanese firm Onward Holdings Co. Ltd.

The Frankfurt exhibition is accompanied by a Prestel Verlag publication (book design by Jasmin Kress, texts by Ingeborg Harms and Matthias Wagner K). The 263-page publication is available at bookshops for 49 EUR and at the museum cashier’s desk for 39 EUR.