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Jil Sander

Jil Sander
Born Heidemarie Jiline Sander
(1943-11-27) 27 November 1943 (age 73)
Wesselburen, Germany
Residence Hamburg, Germany
Nationality German
Other names Queen of Less
Education UCLA
Occupation fashion designer and writer
Awards Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Labels Jil Sander
(1973-)
Prada
(1999-2005)
Uniqlo
(2008-2011)

Heidemarie Jiline "Jil" Sander (German pronunciation: [dʒɪl ˈzandər]; born 27 November 1943 in Wesselburen) is a minimalist German fashion designer and the founder of the Jil Sander fashion house.

Sander studied at Krefeld School of Textiles (Class 1963) and was a foreign exchange student at the University of California, Los Angeles (1963-64). After her stint in UCLA, she moved on to New York as a magazine fashion writer. At age 21, she came back to Hamburg to join her younger and older siblings after their father died unexpectedly at 52.

Sander founded her own fashion house Jil Sander in Rotherbaum, Hamburg, Germany in 1968 with her mother's sewing machine. Her first collection was for Hoechst using the trevira fabric. In 1973, she launched a collection under her own brand name

She overcame a poorly received first Jil Sander Paris collection shown at the Plaza Athénée in 1975 and listed her company on the at the end of the 1980s. She subsequently flourished through the 1980s and 1990s, and soon achieved an international following, thanks to retailers like Linda Dresner, who for a time had a Sander boutique on New York's Park Avenue, and Joan Burstein of Browns in London. In 1995, the Jil Sander group reported $114 million in sales.

In 1999, Prada Group bought a 75% share in her company. Sander remained creative designer and became chairwoman in the new joint venture. Six months later, in January 2000, Sander unexpectedly resigned abruptly as chairwoman and shortly thereafter as chief designer after confrontations with Prada's CEO, Patrizio Bertelli. Nearly all the design and production staff left after her departure. For 2001, the Jil Sander Group reported a net loss of $9.4 million, its first ever. The brand lost 26 million euros (about $30.4 million) in 2002 on flat sales, in part because of the costs of adding retail stores in London and in New York.


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