Ask anyone in fashion what makes a major campaign different today from what it was twenty years ago, and the first word they usually say is, “time”. . . . How there would be a couple of days to think, talk, and plan. Four days for shooting instead of one. And then, after the shoot itself, an opportunity to take stock—waiting for the lab to process the film and make contact sheets—before printing in a darkroom began, which would offer one more round of creative opportunities, decisions, and discoveries, not unlike the post-production phase of feature filmmaking.
But even with all the time in the world, great campaigns have always been like perfect storms. Perhaps none more so than the Spring 1996 collection of Jil Sander. Which began with Sander’s creative director Marc Ascoli’s confident vision of what fresh and comparatively untried young talent might achieve—particularly Craig McDean.
As Ascoli remembers it, Sander was at first somewhat skeptical about hiring McDean—whom she continued to refer to as “Nick [Knight]’s assistant”—even though McDean’s career was well underway, with work for W, French and Italian Vogue, half a dozen cover stories for i-D in 1995 alone, and a string of strong editorial features with Amber Valletta. Moreover, hairstylist Eugene Souleiman and make-up artist Pat McGrath were already becoming key members of the McDean “team.”
As for Sander, it had taken time for “minimalism”—hers, as well as that of her principal rivals Prada and Helmut Lang—to capture the imagination of fashion writers and chic bold-faced names both sides of the Atlantic, and to become a major force in the global fashion industry. So, while Sander might have seemed almost an overnight sensation from the perspective of mid-1990s New York, she had in fact been a success in Germany since the late 1960s and been showing collections in Milan since 1987.
The essential “DNA” of the Sander brand was surprisingly simple: take a few ideas from the best traditions of men’s tailoring—fine fabrics with a restrained palette of color and superb workmanship that aimed to flatter (rather than upstage) the wearer—and make clothing for women of timely elegance that was functional and comfortable. It also did not hurt that Sander was a brilliantly gifted designer with an unerring eye for clean lines and silhouettes. Nor that she had her own ideas about a version of femininity that was at once self-assured, cool and sophisticated. In discussing her success with Constance White of the New York Times in 1997, Sander also pointed out that women had grown stronger and society had changed since the sixties. “When I started, women were so devoted to dressing not for themselves but for somebody else.” They were, she said, “decorated.”
But another important element of the Sander equation in the mid-90s was she was effectively the owner of her company, and delegated few important decisions (or, by many accounts, even comparatively trivial ones). The only real exception was Ascoli (who in 1989 became responsible for the image of the brand). As one German fashion insider who followed Sander’s career closely from the beginning put it, “Marc was the only person Jil listened to,” or “trusted.”
Ascoli presented each season’s campaign with a portfolio of roughly 40 images of a single model. These would appear first as a handsomely produced catalogue (printed in a small edition sent to influential VIPs), and then reappear individually as ads— never overtly about showing the clothes, but as often as not about exploring abstract themes with portraits and still lifes that collectively conveyed the season’s mood and palette with gestures, hints, and clues.
The Spring 1996 collection, featuring an 18-year-old Guinevere van Seenus, was the third Ascoli/McDean Sander collaboration. Other than the nine letters of the Jil Sander logo—rendered in “futura extra bold No.2 D”—on the catalogue cover (with a credit slug buried on a back page, or a list of stores in ads), there were no words or copy of any kind. And at least for me, much of the magic of the campaign is found in the photographs you cannot imagine anyone today daring to include—an empty phone booth, a pair of hands grasping the white leather edge of what might be either the top of a skirt or a handbag, a wall of windows hung with sheer white curtains seen through a pair of glass doors, a coin being tossed in the air.
In addition to effectively communicating Sander’s “minimalist” aesthetic, the catalogues seemed almost more like works of conceptual art than advertising. And indeed one of Jil Sander’s more intriguing ventures of the same year was participating in Germano Celant’s first and only Florence Biennale uniting art with fashion, “Il Tempo e la Moda”—which teamed up Miuccia Prada and Damien Hirst, who created a petting zoo; Jenny Holzer and Helmut Lang who cooked up a fragrance redolent of sex and sweat socks; and paired Sander with the aging enfant terrible of Art Povera, Mario Merz, with whom she made a wind tunnel that apparently displayed a kinetic cloud of dead leaves and white fabric.
But if the Sander/Merz collaboration failed to take the world by storm and is now largely forgotten, McDean’s photographs of van Seenus have become iconic favorites, and rank among the very best of his career. You only need to say the word, “wallpaper” and anyone who knows McDean’s work will understand you are talking about a pair photographs that offer a playful and wholly original take on the issue painters call “figure/field”—showing van Seenus standing in front of a pastel turquoise background with a pale pink floral screen in front of her—the first photo concealing her face, the other revealing it but nothing else.
While no one who was there actually remembers much about the particulars of any one shot, all of them vividly recall how the dynamics of collaboration brought out their best self. How ideas evolved starting with only a polaroid for guidance, and how they kept going and going and going late into the night, experimenting and exploring—never completely sure what had worked and what hadn’t, and trying something else. All with the hope of making something no one had tried or seen before. Like finding the luminous gaze of a Bronzino princess in the face of a girl who’d done a little modeling in California.