JIL SANDER AND THE MAINSTREAMING OF LESBIAN CHIC

The German designer laid the groundwork for the 'boyish' look of '90s minimalism.

Designer Jil Sander, c. 1990s.

Despite a list of hopeful challengers, Jil Sander remains fashion’s undisputed queen of clean. Her influence has spread so far, has proven so pervasive, that it is difficult to tell exactly where it begins and ends when so much of what she pioneered has become our aesthetic norm. There’s hardly a brand today, from The Row to The Ordinary, that doesn’t owe her minimalist (or as she’d prefer to call it ‘pure’) vision at least a small debt. Her crisp white box stores with industrial rails and geometric packaging with stark black type positioned just so set the standard – to say nothing of her brilliant clothes. But it is the intersection of her design philosophy and her sexuality and how they inform one another that remains as deeply fascinating as it is unexplored.

In fashion, it is more or less assumed that men designers fall somewhere on the queer spectrum, but queer women in the field, like queer women in general, have been largely sidelined in the cultural conversation. (Ironic considering that the ‘L’ in LGBT comes first.) There have not been many queer women, open or otherwise, who have received serious recognition, and absolutely none who have achieved what Jil Sander has.