When Raf Simons used to design for Jil Sander

When asked "which brand would you like to get your hands on," Raf Simons never hesitated: «Jil Sander or Helmut Lang.» He became the creative director of the former in 2005, a year before the German brand was acquired by the private equity firm Change Capital Partners, following the turbulent Prada period that began in 1999. Raf Simons' appointment came at a crucial moment for the brand, founded in 1968: Jil Sander was already out of the company and no longer held any role in the creative direction, the split with the Prada group was definitive. Simons, who at the time had a degree in industrial design, experience as the head of the Fashion Department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and as the creative director of a cult brand bearing his own name, suddenly found himself catapulted into the female patterns of Jil Sander, being an untiring investigator of menswear. «I only related to Walter Van Beirendonck, Ann Demeulemeester, Dirk Van Saene, Dries Van Noten, and Martin Margiela, who did their work independently,» he recounted a few years ago in an interview with Vogue. «Now I deal with two brands, my own which is very small, and Jil, which is a large corporate reality. I understand the differences and every day I wonder which of the two is more in line with me. Also because I like both very much.»

Raf Simons was the creative director of Jil Sander for seven years, despite having never worked on womenswear - «I know what it means to go somewhere you've never been, and an entire arena is there with lions waiting for the meat to arrive. I know exactly the feeling I had when I had to go to Jil Sander without ever having done womenswear. It's a challenge. But it's fantastic,» reads a conversation between the designer and Kanye West in Interview Magazine. A challenge that, in retrospect, has been one of the most interesting experiments of the late 2000s: if Jil Sander's creative manifesto emerged as a structuralist antidote in response to the aesthetic excesses of the '80s, Simons' work can be read as the Promethean reworking of shapes, volumes, and colors indifferent to the dominant sensuality codified over the 2000s. From his earliest steps in the field, Simons demonstrated an ability to master both grunge and color block as well as, against all banal expectations, the technical and narrative sophisms of couture.

ss06

ss07

SS08

ss08

ss08

FW07

FW07

FW07

SS09

SS09

SS09

ss09

With his first-ever women's collection, FW06, Simons strictly adhered to the brand's purist and minimal codes and translated them into a style exercise that didn't divide the critics. It was his second collection, SS07, that gave us a glimpse of the Belgian designer's contribution to the house of Sander: an acid yellow shirt with a short dark blue duchess satin skirt, a suit consisting of black tight-legged pants paired with a short jacket with a high single-button closure, under which peeked the collar of an emerald green shirt, brought a new form of energy to the DNA of Jil Sander. Energy that, with the FW07, achieved full recognition from the critics: «On Tuesday, a little-known Belgian designer named Raf Simons caught the attention of the entire fashion world. Simons' collection for Jil Sander, his third since becoming creative director 18 months ago, was perfect. I bet it will make everything else seem a bit artificial, a bit clumsy, a bit silly,» wrote Cathy Horyn in 2007 in the New York Times. «Not that everyone will want a super-thin wool cloak over a pair of slim black pants or a simple wool dress in a deep royal blue with a subtle curved pleat on the front, but it is very likely that, soon, Mr. Simons will change your perception.» According to the American critic, Simons managed to elevate Jil Sander's minimalism to a higher technical level, with a foresight that evoked Helmut Lang. «You can see it in the precise cut of the cloaks, which have the structure of a jacket, or in the unexpected use of darts to define the wool coats,» Horyn concluded.

FW12

FW12

FW12

ss12

SS11

SS11

ss11

Fall 2010

Fall 2010

With the SS09 collection came a change of scene: Simons allowed himself the luxury of expressing his take on the German brand's archives, making 1920s-style fringes and monochromatic graphic silhouettes the narrative voice of an author with a consistently timely perspective on forms and things. «Jil Sander must always be a pure brand and I am aware of the need to make every reference minimal, but I also want to show my freedom to be inspired by the moment,» the designer openly explained. While the narrative of Jil Sander has always dealt with the concept of the "new," the SS11 collection can instead be seen as a "couture" digression that led minimalism to an evolutionary stage, perhaps unexpectedly: a basic tee on an orange climbing skirt, a green cargo jacket with a pink tank top and yellow palazzo pants, or a purple jacket over a neon orange dress and cocktail dresses lightened by stripes under a soundtrack that ranged from Bernard Herrmann for Psycho to Busta Rhymes.

«He is the only one proposing new forms,» commented Emmanuelle Alt, editor-in-chief of Vogue France. Forms that, with the SS12 collection - the last of his "couture trilogy" - reached such a mastery of garment architecture that they surpassed the very concept of purity. If the references to Picasso's ceramics, Simons' icon of modernism, constituted a tribute to Jil Sander's most elitist legacy, with his final collection the direction became clear: on a runway decorated with plexiglass flower cubes designed by florist Mark Colle, models clutched blush-colored coats to their chests like guardians of an intimately disarming femininity. «At the time I was completely drawn to the history of Christian Dior,» Simons recalls of his last years at Jil Sander. However, that is another chapter.