As the latest stewards in the up-and-down history of Jil Sander, Lucie and Luke Meier presented a carefully curated debut menswear collection. Downstairs, a handheld film showed five white-clad figures wandering single file around the outskirts of Milan’s Porta Nuova. Upstairs, past a room of lookbook shots, were the clothes those ghostly commuters were walking in. Luke categorized this group of looks as garments imagined for “space travel in a pretechnological way.” More broadly, he added, their plan at Jil Sander is to express “a modern new idea about menswear without it looking over-technical.” Added Lucie: “We didn’t want to use too much hardware; it was about the softness and the human touch in the pieces.”
Organic technical? Vintage futuristic? Emblematic of what the Meiers wanted to evoke were a long padded jacket in a creamy, vellum-y treated cotton that came with a matching shoulder-slung “space blanket,” and an aluminium-buttoned high mac with strips of bonded silver leather in the lining, worn over a white cashmere shirt and vest. Red topstitching on a treated organza jacket (lovely to the touch) and white stitching on a navy wool equivalent revealed an interesting rhomboid pocket shape. There were fur hand warmers and a detachable down hood and chest warmer. Black leather boots and white sneaker equivalents featured a cutaway double-layer, zig-zag upper formidably meshed by lacing. A diagonal weave green overcoat, almost corded, was unassumingly beautiful.
Jil Sander menswear has liftoff. Let’s see where it lands.