Jil Sander

Jil Sander, born in Wesselburen, Schleswig-Holstein, grew up with her mother and later studied textile design in Krefeld from where she graduated as a textile engineer in 1963. Having spent two years as an exchange student at University of California, Los Angeles, she worked as a fashion editor at German women's magazine Petra before opening her first boutique in a Hamburg suburb in 1967, at age 24. She started out selling fashion designed by Thierry Mugler or Sonia Rykiel and also a few of her own designs. And, with few ups and downs, she founded her eponymous fashion house, Jil Sander GmbH in 1968.

Showing her collection in Paris in 1975 proved a complete failure, though. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the fashion world was dominated by lavish, colorful and glitzy Dynasty-style designs by the likes of Claude Montana with his broad-shouldered leather look, Jil Sander's minimalist collections, with a focus on fabric quality came close to a revolution in the fashion world and were not accepted next to the Parisian catwalks. Her style only started gaining attention in the 1990s.