“We were really into the idea of looking at tailoring,” said Lucie Meier immediately before this show. “How to wear tailoring today. We wanted to sharpen up the silhouette and then play with it.”
“Yes, because we really imagine our guy,” interjected Luke Meier, “which I guess is a little bit autobiographical to me and Lucie, as being someone who knows the codes and details of tailoring. But the evolution became, ‘How does it become cool today? How do you want to wear it?’ And the answer is with a certain attitude. You don’t want to have something stiff and constricting.”
Mrs. and Mr. Meier are clearly serious thinkers. The collections they are producing at Jil Sander reflect that. They are precise, too. Today’s menswear collection was hand-sanitizer sterile in the long, lean purity of the silhouette—buttoned up at the neck, double-coated, and flowing in the skirt, and chunkily vulcanized at the foot—and contained some indubitably lovely pieces. There was a blue overcoat that seemed the Socratic ideal of its form. An all-teal look in Japanese fabrics and the mélange matching pant and shirt looks with action shoulders were nice, too.
There were slightly dubious asides, like the narrow, 40-ish-centimeter-long strapped leather carry bags that couldn’t be ideal for toting much beyond drumsticks. The idea, originally used for mountain climbers looking to sling their down jackets like a backpack on a warm morning, of attaching straps to the inside of overcoats so they could be worn over one shoulder worked only until one of the coats slipped off its strap and hung lumpily off its wearer’s hip. There was a whole inside out section at the end, with typeset label logos, that has been done many times before but was pleasant enough here. Overlook the floating patched-silk cloaks: runway gesture.
That silhouette though was sometimes surgical in its very vertical sharpness: a little old Jil and a little old Prada too, but fresh for now. This iteration of Sander lacks warmth—although perhaps ’twas ever thus—but it is nonetheless generating an abstracted heat.
