Why Jil Sander’s new collection for Uniqlo feels so very right for now
The 76-year-old designer tells Lisa Armstrong what inspired her return to the high street after 11 years
In 2009, not long after the Financial Crash, the German designer Jil Sander, internationally renowned for her quietly luxurious fabrics and precise, delicate minimalism, launched an affordable collection for Uniqlo that set a benchmark for high street collaborations. Eleven years on, there are plenty of customers, including yours truly, who still wear some of the pieces from that debut.
Seventy-six-year-old Sander is sufficiently wealthy, successful and otherwise engaged in life-enhancing projects such as her garden, and museum curation, to have left fashion behind. And yet with her home town of Hamburg locking down again, she has circled back to see if she can repeat the same magic. So here we are on a grey day talking on the phone, she seated at the long table where she works in her Hamburg studio, dressed in navy jumper and trousers. She loves a timeless uniform.
It’s the affordability of the +J proposition that reeled her in again. At her eponymous label, which she finally left for good in 2013, a coat might cost £2,000. At +J, prices start from £15. “It gives me such joy to think that many people will be able to buy these pieces,” she says. “If I could have done a high street collection of this quality 50 years ago, I probably would have, but it wasn’t possible. The technology and the fabrications weren’t available.”
Instead, in 1968 she launched her own label of pared-back, softly tailored and drapy pieces, which proved enormously influential, made her a multi-millionaire and was eventually bought by Prada. Sander lost the right to use her own name professionally – hence the +J. She feels no bitterness, she says, and wishes the label “nothing but good. I think they [husband and wife designers] Lucie and Luke Meier are doing a great job.”
Not being able to call this a Jil Sander production won’t stop it being the most anticipated collaboration of the year. If Coco Chanel has a direct heir, Sander, with her sporty, effortlessly elegant modern aesthetic, is the one. Like Chanel, she always understood the appeal of humble fabrics such as jersey and canvas as much as she grasped the allure of luxury. Make the austere luxurious and the precious practical is a mantra that works for both designers.
The first +J didn’t attempt to replicate the sensuous plushness of Sander’s own pricey label, but focused on her distinctive, architectural silhouette, meticulous engineering and her love of functionalism. It’s a similar story this time, but more so, because fabrications have advanced considerably since 2009.
Of the 60-strong team who worked with her on this, many were there first time round, including David Sims, the British photographer responsible for the campaign images, and Joe Mckenna, the Scottish super-stylist.
For 2020, Sander and Uniqlo developed some new fabrics exclusively, including a merino wool cashmere hybrid and a technical gaberdine with a papery finish. The cut is “controlled oversized”, rather than exaggerated. She wants to see the outline of a human body in those cocoon shapes. But they feel like clothes for now – soothing bubbles of comfort.
The petite Sander, who fits everything on herself, as well as on a house model, says she drew much of the inspiration for +J 2020 while she was gardening during the first lockdown. When she says gardening, she doesn’t mean wafting around with a trug and a pair of secateurs. She is a passionate horticulturist and devotee of English gardens (including Highgrove) and worked with the legendary garden designer Penelope Hobhouse over the decades to create what she calls a mini Sissinghurst at her white stuccoed castle outside Hamburg.
“We have very similar weather,” she notes. “We always say if it’s raining in London we should get our umbrellas
out in Hamburg.” It might seem odd for such a meticulously methodical mind to embrace the seemingly haphazard profusion of an English country garden. But behind the scenes, English gardens require intricate planning and a delicate balance between control and ease – not unlike Sander’s clothes.
“I thought a lot about what we need now – comfort, right? But at the same time everyone’s talking about the importance of getting out into nature. That’s one positive. So I’ve designed some very practical and warm pieces you could wear in the garden – for instance the down coats, but also a wool shirt jacket in a kind of grey-khaki.”
Another positive is that many of us have had an opportunity to assess our wardrobes, weed out the superfluous and focus on the clothes that work and make us happy.
Uniqlo originally asked her to design 10 items, but she convinced them to go bigger. She still has a lot to say. There
‘It gives me such joy to think that many people will be able to buy these pieces’
are around 30 pieces across the men’s and women’s +J line, in grey, navy, black and white. Naturally, some are unisex, because for Sander, androgyny has always been part of the mix.
“It’s incredible what we can achieve now. There’s a lot of lightness, a lot of handmade work in the tailoring with traditional touches such as horsehair in the lining, but also some state-ofthe-art production techniques and sculpted silhouettes.”
She still loves fashion, she says, and is intrigued by the way it has become part of the conversation about ethics, environment and gender identity.
“I just hope the artistry and craft don’t get buried beneath the statements,” she says. And if she were to starting from scratch today? She thinks it would look very close to +J.