GBig questions of style these days: You are invited to a party for the first time in a year and a half. What are you wearing? Or: After months in lockdown, you are in another city for a long weekend for the first time. What are you packing?
Some probably don’t dwell on questions like these for long. Others, full of anticipation, are looking for answers to what is finally coming up in the way of unusually beautiful things. And still others stand a bit perplexed in front of their wardrobes and realize that all the event dresses seem a bit dusty, somehow pre-pandemic, from a time when you could endure jeans on summer days and high heels on summer evenings instead of looking for smarter solutions search.
One for all: the Birkenstock sandal
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Image: Getty
The pandemic leaves its mark in all possible areas of life, including in the cloakroom. The full extent of this will only be visible in the coming months, but at least that is already becoming apparent: If the increased sense of wellbeing was an issue before Corona, for the way we dress, then it could change After a year and a half of the pandemic and staying at home, a solution is emerging: of all things, the stepchild of fashion, functional clothing, could have a great future.
The next heat wave is sure to come
The best example is of course this one shoe, the Birkenstock sandal, which was incredibly practical again last week when Germany was boiling in the wake of the first big heat wave of the year. The slipper – cork footbed, grippy profile – has not been a style sin for a long time and has not been cool since yesterday. Various designers have already referred to them, like Phoebe Philo with Celine or Marni with his footbed sandal, which is really called that. Others worked in close cooperation with the parent company from Neustadt (Wied) – Valentino, Rick Owens, Proenza Schouler.
Lucie and Luke Meier, chief designer at Jil Sander
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Image: Jil Sander
If you sit on a bench on a scorching hot afternoon in any big city in one of those supposedly hip, young, urban districts, you will notice that almost everyone wears Birkenstock. Lucie and Luke Meier, the designers at Jil Sander who have now adopted the sandals, should have designed the one part that is really needed for this summer. With their work they show, more clearly than their predecessors, what could be gotten out of the once terrible concept called functional clothing in the future.
Perhaps it is because these two fashion designers are working at a time that many do not seem exactly right. “It seems to me as if we’ve been here for 100 years,” says Luke Meier when you talk to him with his wife Lucie via zoom. We’re talking about Milan. The two have nothing against the city. As fashion designers, they owe their careers to the opportunities that Milan has offered them in recent years.
Get out of the city and into the mountains
As a spouse, however, the Meiers used to take every opportunity to escape the big city and head out into the mountains. “We both come from areas where you don’t always wear evening dresses.” Lucie, 39 years old, whose maiden name remains a secret, is the daughter of an Austrian mother and a German father and grew up in Zermatt, Switzerland. Luke Meier, 45, his mother British and father Swiss, grew up in Canada. As young college graduates, they met in New York and became a couple. Married. Initially, each of them pursued their careers, he as the creative director of the streetwear brand Supreme, she at Dior in Paris.
When they moved to Milan in 2017 to work together at Jil Sander, they had long since grown into their big city life. And at the same time they were suddenly closer to nature. The mountains can be seen from Milan on good days. It is no more than 90 minutes by car to the Alps. No big surprise that this is what inspires designers. A few months before the pandemic began, they launched a new brand, Jil Sander +, as part of Jil Sander. They turned the reduced, classic Jil Sander look further in the direction of more functional pieces. Jil Sander for outdoor use.