THERE USED to be an advert on British television for Audi cars which was intended to prove how sleek and expensive and impeccably designed that product was. And, furthermore, how all these desirable qualities were somehow the very essence of Germany. The voice-over summed up the sales pitch in three words which became a wry, yuppie catchphrase: vorsprung durch technik. It meant: progress through technology.
Jil Sander is proof that the concept of vorsprung durch technik can apply to clothes too. Her designs are austere and elegant. The fabrics from which they take their shape have been especially woven in state-of-the-art factories. And the end products are breathtakingly expensive. They are about as far removed from the jolly ruffles and swags of this season's look as - well, as an Audi car is from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. These are serious clothes for people who are serious about what they wear. Her fans are sometimes referred to as 'Sandernistas' - an army of well-heeled folk who stride through their confident lives in a beautifully cut uniform, ironically unlike their namesakes, a swarthy and motley crew of Latin American socialists.
As you might expect, therefore, Sander is not exactly a thigh-slapping comedienne. She radiates sincerity and passion in long, seamless speeches of commitment to her work. She chops the air with her ringless hands (she is not keen on jewellery preferring to wear only a man's watch), she plucks at her own clothes to make a point ('Feel the quality') and when she talks, as she constantly does, about 'this transition period' she does not mean the political corridor in which tiny Hong Kong finds itself - she means how the world is changing in what it desires to wear.
She was born in a transition period herself, in Hamburg in 1943. She was part of a generation that grew up with nothing except hunger and defeat. 'I come from a country after a war, when there were a lot of problems, people had to eat and to clean everything up,' she says. 'Then they had to make the industries.' Which, of course, the German nation did with spectacular success. (Vorsprung durch technik.) To leapfrog so quickly from austerity to luxury ... no wonder she specialises in spare, rigorous garments which cost a fortune.
After studying textile design in Hamburg, a course which she has described as 'boring as hell, the German approach in the Sixties' but which has subsequently stood her in fine stead, she went to Los Angeles to be a fashion journalist. She dismisses this period in her life - it clearly fails to interest her anymore - but it has left a curious residue. She is remarkably cautious about the press and about marketing techniques. 'I only started the press work eight years ago,' she says. 'I was a little wary because of my background, I was worried about the intensity. I didn't want to push, I wanted to do what I wanted to believe. The wonderful thing today is that the consumer is not captured anymore by this marketing world.' In much the same way, she disliked being a freelance designer. 'I worked with people and they always tell you what you can't do because of commercial things. So I have to design myself,' she says.
Her first boutique was opened in 1968. She stocked both her own designs and, under the Chloe label, those of a young Hamburg lad called Karl Lagerfeld. Before the opening, she did two significant things. First of all, she changed her name. She had been christened Heidemarie Jiline Sander but that became just Jil. It seems that she simply decided that Heidi, with all its connotations of plaits and dirndl skirts and girlishness, was no longer appropriate. Then she sold her car which was a Volkswagen - the German 'people's car', a little runaround Beetle. When she uses examples of expensive excellence to parallel her own products these days, she talks about Porsche and Mercedes. 'They have such quality inside because there is so much understanding to do better and better and better ...' By 1973, she was ready to stage her first collection. German women loved her although the French, when she showed in Paris in the opulent late 1970s, disliked her minimalism. They weren't ready then for a concept which was truly prescient (it's surely no coincidence that she came second in an American competition for the best design for the year 2000 at about that time). When she launched her first fragrance in 1977, she called it Woman Pure and followed it immediately with Man Pure; as this was an era when heavy narcotic scents, as epitomised by Opium, were clogging fashion's airwaves, she seems to have anticipated light, clean, unisex fragrances by almost two decades.
