Jil Sander once noted that those who wear her clothes are not fashionable but modern. It’s a word too many have too little time for, but a word that we were once keen to be defined by. If we needed to be defined at all.
For, as we are aware, and as Virginia Woolf knew, so much so that she made it the theme of an essay - words fail us. ‘Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words,’ Woolf wrote, ‘they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old.’ Modern was not the ideal description for the Jil Sander ethos that remains with the company long after she loosened her grip and left in 2013, any more than the word ‘minimalist’. (‘My eyes respond to a smart, modern style in dressing. I am alert to anything out of tune: the wrong colour, shape or proportion.’) Here is another word frequently applied to Sander as much as that trio of designers (…