Cashmere-
blend coat,
£230the stealth success story on the high street.
The latest collection has all the Sander hall-
marks her fans adore: a straight-cut wrap
coat, a navy felted-wool sweater, a pleated
shirtdress and minimalist leather accessories.
High-quality materials are key — “I feel every
textile for its properties and possibilities,” she
says. Under Sander’s uberchic watch, grey is
“graphite” and camel is “caramel”.
Much like its creator, the collection isn’t
shouty, garish or Insta-friendly: the famously
reclusive designer, born Heidemarie Jiline
Sander, rarely gives interviews. She doesn’t
dress celebrities, isn’t on social media and
has an extremely exacting eye. She left the
fashion label that bears her name three
times (once in 2000, again in 2004, after an
18-month stint, and finally in 2013 after
rejoining the year before. But more on that
later). When she’s not obsessing over fabrica-
tions and silhouettes, she’s preoccupied with
gardening. Home is Hamburg, where she
enjoys royal-like status, and a holiday house
in Ibiza, where she tends to her olive trees.
After years of running her own company
with various stakeholders, she’s enjoying
being in the driving seat. “I mostly feel like
I want to do what I would like to do.”
Sander has been a fixture in an industry of
hot-then-not names and revolving creative
directors since 1968, when she started
her namesake label at the age of 24. In her
previous job as a fashion editor at the
German magazine Petra she had often called
designers and asked them to remake their
clothes so she could shoot them. “I was frus-
trated by the lack of suitable trousers avail-
able for modern women,” she says. And so
her eponymous label was born with a “less
and luxe” design mission that eventually
revolutionised the working woman’s ward-
robe in the 1980s. Out went dowdy secre-
tarial skirts. In came sleek, stripped-back
suiting. Her signature use of muted colours
and technical fabrics went on to define the
1980s and 1990s — before Phoebe Philo’s
Celine, there was Jil Sander.
In 1989 the company went public, listed
on the Frankfurt stock exchange, and in
1999 Prada acquired a 75 per cent share, after
which Sander resumed creative directorship
on and off until 2013. “Perhaps I was really
like a divorced woman who still has children
with her ex-husband and wants to take care
of them,” she later told Frieze magazine.
Little has been written about Sander’s
personal life, but according to German
newspapers she left to care for her longtime
partner, Angelica Mommsen, who died of
cancer in 2014. In the years since Sander
has dabbled in curating exhibitions (her first
solo retrospective was at the Museum
Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt, in 2017) and
founded a consultancy firm. Her first client?
Shirt, £40,
and jumper,
£50Uniqlo. They joined forces in 2009 for
a debut collection of high-minded basics at
low prices, called +J. Nick Vinson, an editor-
at-large for Wallpaper* magazine, has been a
fan since day one. “I still wear the +J white
shirts 12 years on. They were built to last
and not a single one of the mother-of-pearl
buttons has come off, unlike many shirts
today at ten or more times the price.” The
original collaboration lasted for five seasons,
then Sander returned to Uniqlo last year. “It
was fascinating for me to look at democratic
pricing,” she says. “I was able to bring all my
knowledge and training I had my whole life
— and you can actually buy it and keep it.”
For the pragmatic German who values
function over form, and has the Hamburg
weather to contend with, that means a very
good coat. “I’m a city person. I very much
like coats. Throughout my career I have been
use-orientated — it’s always about function-
ality and comfort.” This season Sander has
taken two winter classics, the parka and the
duffel coat, and reworked them in wool,
cashmere and polyester satin — both are
worth setting an alarm for. “I felt like our
times ask for solidity and sheltering shapes,”
she says.
Despite its success, this will be her last
collection for Uniqlo (for now). Sander is
preparing a book and wants to spend time in
her garden, planted more than 40 years ago
and inspired by the garden at Sissinghurst
Castle, in Kent. “My first real impression for
gardening was at Sissinghurst. At the time
they had two female gardeners — they were
masters. It was before the Channel tunnel
was built, so it was really private,” she recalls.
“I actually started planning it with the
gardener of Prince Charles. Our neighbour
was somehow a relative of the English
royal family, so it was a very interesting start
40 years ago. Now I hope I can do some
cutting myself.”
In the meantime she’ll bathe in the Uniqlo
glow one last time. “The public response
has been quite a touching reward. It gives me
the impression that I haven’t lost touch with
the zeitgeist.” ■The +J collection is available from Thursday;
uniqlo.comJil Sander at
the AW13 show
for the Jil
Sander labelShe doesn’t dress
celebrities, isn’t
on social media and
has an extremely
exacting eye
The Sunday Times Style • 67