FASHION: Lessons in Lessness

According to the dictums issued by fashion magazines earlier this fall, the look of the season was "a new glamour," but it might just as easily have been described as call-girl chic. Women were supposed to stride around in stiletto heels, fishnet stockings and microminis -- some of which Vogue featured in colorful versions of rubber and polyvinyl chloride. The same style dominated the spring collections shown in Paris and Milan last month. There were front-slit short skirts from Karl Lagerfeld, gold-mesh biker shorts from Gianfranco Ferre and rhinestone-studded hot pants from the team of Dolce & Gabbana, who acknowledged that their D&G line had been inspired by Jodie Foster's preteen streetwalker in Taxi Driver. Vulgarity, it seems, reigns on the runways.

But not everywhere. At least one designer is leading a crusade of refinement against the outre. She is Germany's Jil Sander, 50, whose extremely simple, graceful clothes have won legions of devotees among women accustomed to spending upwards of $2,500 for a jacket and a pair of trousers -- including such notable shoppers as Barbra Streisand, Winona Ryder, Uma Thurman and life- stylist Martha Stewart. Sander has turned her 20-year-old Hamburg atelier into a $200 million fashion-and-cosmetics empire, and she has joined Armani and Chanel as one of the three best-selling elite designers in the U.S. There are already 22 Sander boutiques worldwide; by the end of next year, there will be 10 more, from Osaka to Houston, Dallas to New York City. Even fashion editors who tout couture's more fanciful currents on the pages of their magazines venerate Sander. "You walk into her showroom and think, 'My God, this is heaven,"' says Harper's Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis. "You think, 'Do I need to wear anyone else's clothes ever again?"'

Sander's spring 1995 collection, wrote Women's Wear Daily, "showed Milan how women should dress -- with subtlety and elegance." Unlike so many other designers (including Jean-Paul Gaultier, who staged his latest show amid carousel horses and a pet rat), Sander does not approach fashion as performance art. In Milan, on an unadorned runway, she presented quiet, knee- length dresses that were refreshingly unclingy, soft jackets and billowing pants in glimmering cottons, a faint blue A-line suit so purely sophisticated that it is something Catherine Deneuve could have worn in 1964.

Sander, who lives in a Hamburg mansion filled with minimalist art, describes her design philosophy as "less and luxe." She favors spare lines and expensive fabrics; she eschews loud colors and elaborate prints; she loathes accessories. She grew up in a modest Hamburg suburb and has said her taste developed in reaction to the kitsch and consumerism that dominated postwar Germany. "Ever since I was young, I would look at a woman and think she could look much classier, much more powerful, sophisticated and elegant," she says. "That's what always counted for me, not that obviousness that is the old way of seeing fashion."