JIL SANDER — The Founder’s Story and the Search for Materials, from Clothing to Perfume

I am not a minimalist, but a purist.

Jil Sander

To see Jil Sander simply as a house of clothes with little decoration is to miss an essential part of its work. Its founder explored how materials support a form, and how that form changes the posture and sensations of the person wearing it. Choosing fabrics, cutting them in three dimensions, and testing the fit again and again: this work lies beneath the apparent simplicity of the clothes.

Fragrance was part of that world early on. From the first perfumes in 1979 to the launch of Olfactory Series 1 in 2025, the choices made by the founder and the makers who later took the house forward reveal an interest in materials that connects clothing and scent.

Contents

At a glance
The founder and the origins of the house
The brand’s approach
Sources

At a glance

Brand: JIL SANDER
Founded: 1968, beginning with a Hamburg boutique; the first womenswear collection was presented in 1973
Founder: Jil Sander
Place of origin: Hamburg, Germany
First fragrances: Woman Pure and Man Pure, 1979
Official website: JIL SANDER

The founder and the origins of the house

Textile studies and life in America

Jil Sander was born in 1943 in Wesselburen, northern Germany. Her mother had escaped the bombing of Hamburg and taken refuge with Sander’s grandparents near the North Sea. She returned to Hamburg as a young child and later studied textile engineering in Krefeld.

As a young woman, Sander wanted to live far from home. She told her father that she would give back the Volkswagen he had bought her if she could go to California instead. He agreed, and she left, discovering a freedom unlike anything she had known. In New York, she also worked as an assistant at the women’s magazine McCall’s.

Her father’s death brought her back to Germany. She initially intended to return to America, but stayed in Hamburg to support her mother and younger brother. With both her own ambitions and her responsibilities to her family to consider, she began her working life in Germany.

From fashion magazines to a Hamburg boutique

After returning home, Sander worked in fashion editorial at Constanze and Petra. As she selected clothes for photographs, she wanted their materials and shapes to reflect her own ideas. Asking manufacturers to alter existing designs gradually led to work on small collections of her own.

In 1968, she opened a boutique in Hamburg’s Pöseldorf district. Her own womenswear collection followed in 1973. She had moved from presenting clothes made by others to giving form to her own ideas about proportion and materials.

Her clothes responded to changes in women’s lives and roles in society. Sander herself needed clothes that would support her as a working woman. Moving away from inherited images of femininity, she sought forms that allowed their wearers to move and act on their own terms. Her interests extended beyond the single category of businesswear.

I always wanted people to feel great, to feel strong in my clothes.

Jil Sander

Researching fabrics and three-dimensional cuts

Sander valued the tailoring and quality fabrics of her parents’ generation. Yet she felt that clothing, particularly women’s clothing, needed patterns and shapes suited to the times. Her aim was more subtle than simply dressing women in men’s clothes: she wanted to change how the body was seen and how gender was expressed.

Research into materials was central to that work. She brought advanced fabrics from Japan and developed new materials with sculptural qualities alongside Italian producers. Fabric was the starting point that made a form possible, rather than something used to decorate an already finished shape.

With less decoration on the surface, the cut, the movement of a fabric and small adjustments of balance become more visible. In her work with stylist Joe McKenna, one look consisting of a white shirt and skirt was tried on 14 different models. Time spent refining details made the result appear simple. That intensity of work is part of what Sander’s purism means.

1979: giving the first perfume a modern form

In 1979, the house expanded into fragrance and body care, beginning with Woman Pure and Man Pure. Sander also worked with designer Peter Schmidt on perfume bottles and the brand’s logo.

With Woman Pure, she wanted to move away from the nostalgia and mystery surrounding the presentation of high-end French perfumes at the time. She saw her first perfume as a statement of the ideas behind her clothes.

I dreamt of a light fragrance in a modern setting and came up with a frosted square.

Jil Sander

The geometric, square bottle connected with her belief in reducing clothes to the essential. Including its container, fragrance would belong within the house’s vision of modern life, rather than standing apart as an ornamental object from another world.

Sun arrived in 1989, the same year the company was listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. As Sander developed the fashion house, perfume also became a way of taking its name to a wider audience.

From the founder to a new generation of makers

After Prada acquired a majority stake in the house in 1999, Sander stepped down in 2000. She subsequently returned twice, with her final work for the house appearing in the Spring/Summer 2014 collection. The brand bearing her name passed to other makers.

Lucie and Luke Meier took over its creative direction in 2017. In 2021, the house joined the OTB group. Two years later, it renewed its licence agreement with fragrance partner Coty, moving towards a new high-end fragrance offering aligned with the fashion business.

Olfactory Series 1 was announced on 28 January 2025 as part of that new phase. Under the Meiers’ direction, five perfumers created six unisex fragrances. More than four decades had passed since the founder’s first venture into perfume.

The couple did not set out simply to recreate the house’s past. They selected ingredients and scent profiles that interested them, giving the perfumers a clear direction while leaving each of them room to create.

Each scent is inspired by something we personally like or places we have visited.

Lucie and Luke Meier

Simone Bellotti became the house’s creative director in March 2025. Olfactory Series 1 is a fragrance project developed under the Meiers before his appointment.

The brand’s approach

Using aldehydes to bring out natural materials

Olfactory Series 1 is connected by an approach that pairs natural materials with aldehydes. The aldehydes used here are a group of synthetic fragrance ingredients that lend brightness and volume. They bring natural materials into sharper focus, but their role differs from one fragrance to another.

Julie Massé, who created Leaf and Earth, wanted to translate the feeling of the house’s clothes into fragrance: structured and precise, yet comfortable to wear.

That does not mean “using fewer ingredients”.

Julie Massé

Massé sought a composition that retained complexity beneath an apparently simple whole, with softness extending into its details. For Leaf, she chose aldehydes that would bring out a vivid, sparkling greenness; for Earth, ones that would emphasise natural dampness. The collection’s shared signature serves to make the differences between materials and scenes more distinct, rather than repeating the same smell.

Leaf and Earth: memories of a garden and Japan

Leaf draws on the summers Massé spent with her grandmother in Grasse, harvesting tomatoes from the garden and making tomato sauce together. That memory became a fragrance evoking the fruit and leaves of Black Krim tomatoes.

The key materials chosen were key lime, carbon dioxide-extracted cardamom and cornmint. A memory of tomatoes is constructed through the scents of other plants. Aldehydes give the smooth combination of citrus and mint a vivid green outline.

Earth began with a Jil Sander show in which a moss-covered runway lay within a white space. The contrast between that artificial whiteness and nature led Massé towards the sensation of walking in a damp forest or through rain. It also brought back the memory of eating matsutake mushrooms as a child in Japan.

To give form to that scene, she combined Damask rose, centifolia rose from Grasse and carbon dioxide-extracted patchouli leaves. The fragrance moves a rose-chypre structure towards the impressions of ground after rain and matsutake mushrooms. Leaf explores the greenness of plants being harvested; Earth turns towards damp soil. The same perfumer’s memories develop into different expressions of nature.

Six Chapter II fragrances have since expanded the collection, which now comprises twelve scents. Massé’s Shiso, for example, uses juniper berry to express the crisp character of shiso leaves. A fragrance’s subject is not necessarily the name of an ingredient it contains. Reconstructing a familiar impression through other carefully chosen materials is another part of the series’ creative approach.

Preserving irregularity in industrially produced glass

The bottle was developed in collaboration with design studio Formafantasma. The challenge was to give an industrially produced container the feeling of something made by hand. Instead of pursuing a perfectly symmetrical, uniform object, its makers retained small irregularities in the distribution and contours of the glass.

The white, bell-shaped cover is made of aluminium. It protects the fragrance from light and lifts away as a whole when the perfume is used. Removing it creates a gesture of revealing a personal fragrance. The movement of the hand connects the orderly white exterior with the slight irregularities of the glass beneath.

Manufacturing partners included HEINZ-GLAS for the glass, Aptar for the pump and TNT Group for the cover. Even this apparently simple bottle depends on collaboration between design and manufacturing expertise.

The relationship between materials and form that Sander explored in clothing is revisited in the house’s later perfumes, through compositions and containers made to be held. Leaf and Earth offer different ways of depicting nature; the glass retains its subtle unevenness. These specific choices provide a way into Jil Sander’s work in fragrance.