Jil Sander

MILAN, September 23, 2008

By Sarah Mower

What is it about the twenties that is playing on so many designers' minds? For Raf Simons at Jil Sander, it was the moment the Parisian avant-garde discovered African art and gave birth to modernism: Simons referenced this by projecting a Man Ray photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse cradling an African head sculpture onto the backdrop of the runway as the audience assembled. Simons said it was just a matter of spontaneous instinct that made him take flapper fringing as a central device in the show. "But it was more about the aesthetics of that time. I didn't want to do a 'Charleston' collection," he said. "Jil Sander must always be pure, and I'm aware of making any reference minimal, but I also want to show my freedom to be inspired by the moment."

The opening of the show was a powerfully graphic series of one-color silhouettes in which silken skeins of fringing were draped over stretch bodysuits. It began a sequence of precision-cut experiments in form that abstracted tailoring into unexpected elements—shorts suits sliced into sharp, asymmetric angles at the front; hemlines constructed from rectangular panels; jackets made with a swooping drape in the back; leather shifts with incisions left open at the hip.

To be sure, Simons' exhaustive demonstrations of a million new ways to loop, drape, and fly a fringe (they even dangled to floor level on bags) did eventually tip over into tedium. He could have dispensed with a lot of that, but the development of his overriding vision of a clean, even glacial modernism is a powerful thing to watch.