Wednesday, September 7, 2011

the long journey to the suits with "an engineer's precision"




from a feminine appearance, catering to the male gaze

"1968, the year of the student riots, was also the year that Jil Sander founded her own company. She single-handedly painted the outside of her boutique black, schlepped around mannequins for the store windows, worked in the office, and designed clothing for professional women"

to a more gender neutral appearance






''If you look as a professional, 98 percent of what we see now is cut-and-paste,'' she says. ''It's all old-fashioned, the work. It's coming from vintage, and so it's almost as if fashion today has become a stupid story.''

The pursuit of lightness has always been one of her main concerns, she explains, as our car moves away from the curb and into traffic. She is referring to her determination, as a designer, to take basic items of clothing and refine their silhouettes, eliminating surface distractions and cutting away at everything she judges to be extraneous to the function and purpose of the garment, until finally what remains is a deceptively simple and, not infrequently, beautiful thing.


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