by germinal » Thu Mar 27, 2014 8:39 am
Whilst there has been overlap over the years, particularly when the former owned the latter in the early 00s, you're being daft if you can't see the differences. Both were concerned - and still are in prada's case (i'm not sure jil sander has any real brand direction left at this point but that's for another time) - with the empowerment of women through luxury fashion: Miuccia was famously a member of the communist party and involved in women's rights activism and Jil basically invented businesslesbian chic. but they approached this empowerment completely differently. prada has always had an eye for the outrageous and the ornamental and a healthy dose of italian bad taste - see her recent obsessions with fur and and jewels, her ongoing love for the history of european and 20th century american bourgeois dress. flapper dresses, prussian imperial clothing, luxury favela wear... she's done it all and she did it first. her collections are also always highly conceptual, even if the concept is esoteric and difficult to parse by the time it makes it to the runway. All this while building a business empire that makes jil sander look small-fry in comparison. Jil Sander on the other hand is much more focussed, reductionist. it's probably easier to say what 90s jil sander wasn't. never as sexy as calvin klein, never as avant garde or as futurist as helmut lang, nor looking to the past as much as prada. relentlessly modern (which is why the stuff from the nineties looks really dated: everyone buy it now for that 90s revivalist cool). This makes the way raf simons (or his team) expanded the design language of jil sander all the more impressive imo - a lot of what is associated with the brand now is his (their) doing, and, if anything, has left the brand ideologically closer to Celine than Prada.