Lessons in Lessness

By GINIA BELLAFANTE As she opens boutiques in the U.S., Germany''s Jil Sander has become a fashion star of the ''90s by preaching opulent austerity

According to the dictums issued by fashion magazines earlier this fall, the look of the season was "a new glamour," but it might just as easily have been described as call-girl chic. Women were supposed to stride around in stiletto heels, fishnet stockings and microminis -- some of which Vogue featured in colorful versions of rubber and polyvinyl chloride. The same style dominated the spring collections shown in Paris and Milan last month. There were front-slit short skirts from Karl Lagerfeld, gold-mesh biker shorts from Gianfranco Ferre and rhinestone-studded hot pants from the team of Dolce & Gabbana, who acknowledged that their D&G line had been inspired by Jodie Foster's preteen streetwalker in Taxi Driver. Vulgarity, it seems, reigns on the runways.

But not everywhere. At least one designer is leading a crusade of refinement against the outre. She is Germany's Jil Sander, 50, whose extremely simple, graceful clothes have won legions of devotees among women accustomed to spending upwards of $2,500 for a jacket and a pair of trousers -- including such notable shoppers as Barbra Streisand, Winona Ryder, Uma Thurman and life- stylist Martha Stewart. Sander has turned her 20-year-old Hamburg atelier into a $200 million fashion-and-cosmetics empire, and she has joined Armani and Chanel as one of the three best-selling elite designers in the U.S. There are already 22 Sander boutiques worldwide; by the end of next year, there will be 10 more, from Osaka to Houston, Dallas to New York City. Even fashion editors who tout couture's more fanciful currents on the pages of their magazines venerate Sander. "You walk into her showroom and think, 'My God, this is heaven,"' says Harper's Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis. "You think, 'Do I need to wear anyone else's clothes ever again?"'

Sander's spring 1995 collection, wrote Women's Wear Daily, "showed Milan how women should dress -- with subtlety and elegance." Unlike so many other designers (including Jean-Paul Gaultier, who staged his latest show amid carousel horses and a pet rat), Sander does not approach fashion as performance art. In Milan, on an unadorned runway, she presented quiet, knee- length dresses that were refreshingly unclingy, soft jackets and billowing pants in glimmering cottons, a faint blue A-line suit so purely sophisticated that it is something Catherine Deneuve could have worn in 1964.

Sander, who lives in a Hamburg mansion filled with minimalist art, describes her design philosophy as "less and luxe." She favors spare lines and expensive fabrics; she eschews loud colors and elaborate prints; she loathes accessories. She grew up in a modest Hamburg suburb and has said her taste developed in reaction to the kitsch and consumerism that dominated postwar Germany. "Ever since I was young, I would look at a woman and think she could look much classier, much more powerful, sophisticated and elegant," she says. "That's what always counted for me, not that obviousness that is the old way of seeing fashion."

Her contempt for the overt has led observers to compare her to that other purveyor of modern simplicity, Giorgio Armani -- an analogy Sander rejects. "I'm happy he exists," she says, "because he brought a minimalist vision of fashion compared with, say, Chanel or Versace. But I feel far away from him; these are two different concepts." In fact, Sander's style is even more spartan than Armani's, her palette even narrower; her detractors would argue that her look is far more severe and somber. "She is one of those designers other designers laugh at," says Joan Weinstein, who did so well carrying the Sander line in her Chicago boutique that she recently opened an all-Sander shop close by. "They say, 'Oh, there's nothing exciting here,' but they forget we are in the business of selling clothes."

Sander has attracted an appreciative following ever since she launched her first collection in 1974, but for years she remained a marginal figure. Her early collections, first shown in Hamburg, were not tremendously well received, and when she unveiled a collection in Paris for the first time in the late '70s, her clothes were ignored. So she left the competitive French couture scene ("I didn't want to get killed," she says) and returned to Hamburg, where she continued to study design and showed her collections to small, invitation-only groups of buyers and press.

Her coterie of loyalists expanded considerably once affluent women began to reject the gold-chain-belt opulence of the 1980s. "Nothing gives me more pleasure than to see that they 'get it,"' says Sander, who often speaks with missionary zeal for her aesthetic. "I see so many people following, and that's such a nice thing. You see they are getting better taste, better culture; they understand why something doesn't have to be seen from 100 meters away." Says Martha Stewart of her Sander wardrobe: "Jil's responded to the needs of people like me. I'm busy; I travel a lot; I want to look great in a picture. You don't have to put on fancy shoes or earrings or bracelets; the clothes just look terrific on their own. And I'm an inside-out person -- the workmanship is unbeatable."

Sander is not one of those designers whose participation in the process of making clothes ends when they have made a sketch. A former student of textile engineering, she insists on controlling all the details of manufacturing, and has invented fabrics like wool velvet and wool linen. She tries on every item in her collection before it is sent to stores and has been known to delay or refuse shipments of pieces that are not perfectly executed to her specifications. To keep her production schedules on target and to make sure - there isn't anything lacking in her line, Sander boldly asks retail buyers to make their orders ahead of the conventional schedule set by other designers. "It takes a lot of guts to ask buyers to buy out of season," says Debra Pearlstein Greenberg, an executive at Louis, Boston, the posh store that houses an expansive new Sander boutique. "It's amazing that she gets people to do this, but you go to her showroom, and everyone's there."

Sander is also a committed tailor, lining jackets in ways that keep them from losing shape, slanting a hip pocket in just the right direction so it will have a slimming effect. "She is a great technician," says Tilberis. "You look at one of her coats, and it hangs perfectly at the shoulders. So many designers try to do a lean cut, and so many of them get it wrong."

"Quality means something," Sander likes to say. It is on the basis of quality that she justifies her pricing, which in some instances is exceedingly aggressive. Her suits and dresses are no more expensive than those of her rivals, but some of the most basic pieces in her line run far higher than similar items in other collections. A sleeveless wool pullover is $610, a white button-down cotton shirt $585, the latter almost three times what a nearly identical garment from Calvin Klein costs. According to retailers, the Sander versions sell quite well. "My white shirts are made of sea-island cotton," Sander explains, "in the finest gauge you can spin." They are "Lord Byron quality."

Sander has no intention of lowering prices and dressing the masses. Unlike almost all other designers, she has refused to produce an ancillary "bridge," or moderately priced, line similar to Armani's Emporio or Calvin Klein's CK. "I don't believe in mass-market clothes because they don't have any vision," Sander says. "I call them dead clothes." Marketing considerations may also have inhibited Sander from selling less expensive apparel. Doing so might bruise the delicate flower of her mystique, since the strange dynamic of clothes buying often dictates that a high price -- the frisson of paying it, the exclusivity it suggests -- makes a blouse or a skirt easier, not harder, to sell.

The elite customers who pay four-figure sums for Sander's clothes may not know it, but their taste is actually similar to that of the millions who shop at the Gap or order from J.Crew: both groups favor pared-down functionalism. Indeed, Sander recommends the Gap as a place to buy a classic, cheap white / shirt, saying that shopping there is better than going to a "mishy-mushy mass-market boutiquey where you try to be a little bit chic and you're not." Richard Martin, the director of the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, says the wide appeal of subdued, simple clothes reflects the times. "At a sober moment in economic, social and cultural history, the style provided by the Banana Republic or the Gap or Jil is addressing the fact that people want to live far from the permutations of fashion." And farther still from cocktail dresses indebted to the science of polymers.

With reporting by Dorie Denbigh/Paris