04/11/14 - INDUSTRY PROJ. (Sander AW15/16 concept)

Team Jil board - Caroline Wong

Brand board - Caroline Wong

For this 2 week project, I will be working as part of the promotion team for Jil Sander, a design house that has seen Sander herself leave 3 times. I chose Jil Sander as the aesthetic of the brand fits my own personal style and I knew I'd be able to have fun and work well if I was in a team that also liked the brand for this reason. Our team consists of two designers (mens and womens), a stylist and two promotions people. 

The quote we chose to start from is as follows:

All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face with sober sense the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men. 

(The Communist Manifesto)

And the parts in particular that we decided to focus on were 'solid melts into air, 'profaned' and 'relations with their fellow men'. Having been given the task to come up with a collection along with all the promotional aspects for AW15/16, we came up with the concept of a line that would be somewhat androgynous. During the presentation, something that John said resonated with the team and it was that 'a Sander woman wouldn't want to sleep with a Sander man and vice versa'. We decided to make it our team's goal to create a unity between sexes where gender boundaries were hazy and as such, this corresponded with both 'relations with their fellow men' and 'solid melts into air'. We thought about ideas such as gradients between genders and following a look on WGSN for macro trends, we came up with a finalised concept which proved to be useful as we were all able to work on moodboards overnight to bring in the next morning.

The profaned aspect refers to our approach to this collection. Since the menswear and womenswear do tend to differ despite both having aspects of minimalist design, we wanted to ensure we weren't going to play by the rules and stick to what is typically known of Sander. Similarly, the word 'profaned' can be used to describe the blurred line between man and woman that will be shown in our collection.

We've worked really well as a group so far and have a number of ideas in our heads of different promotion techniques. As we worked with each other, our ideas flowed and things bounced off of each other so much so that we ended up recording our conversations rather than stopping to write everything down. This group work already seems like it'll be very enjoyable.