Jil Sander

Jil Sander built this store rather than inheriting it, developing the retail concept with the architects Casper Mueller Kneer instead of dropping a standard fit-out into a shell, and the brief was intimacy rather than scale.

That is an unusual position on New Bond Street, where square footage is normally the statement. The house has been shaped creatively by Lucie and Luke Meier, who kept the founder’s discipline while taking some of the severity out of it, and the store reads as an argument for that.

What minimalist fashion New Bond Street shoppers misjudge

The clothes look plain in photographs and are not. Everything is carried by cut, cloth weight and proportion rather than by print or hardware, so a jacket that reads as unremarkable on a screen behaves completely differently on a shoulder. This is a shop that has to be visited to be understood.

Left alone until you ask

Womenswear, menswear, leather goods and footwear share the floor, which is not crowded with product. Staff work on the assumption that a customer browsing wants quiet, and they are right often enough that it has become the house manner.