EP 05 — INGEBORG HARMS

In this episode, I’m joined by Ingeborg Harms, one of Germany’s leading fashion writers, cultural critics, and thinkers, for a conversation about Jil Sander; her personality, her vision, and the ideas that continue to make her work so relevant today.

Our conversation grew out of Jil Sander by Jil Sander, the 2024 book created by Jil Sander in close collaboration with its author, Ingeborg Harms, and book designer Irma Boom. Harms has worked closely with Sander over several decades, including on the Präsens exhibition book, giving her a rare and intimate perspective on both the designer and the world she created.

We talk about Sander’s uncompromising pursuit of perfection, her relationship to modernity and craftsmanship, her understanding of individualism and identity, and her constant desire to imagine what comes next rather than repeat what has already been done. Harms also reflects on the contrast between Sander’s public image and private person behind it.

The conversation also turns to fashion journalism itself: how Harms approaches a subject, what it means to look beneath the surface of fashion, and how fashion can be understood through art, architecture, literature, history, materials, technology, and society.

Harms has spent decades writing about fashion and culture for publications including the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Vogue, Self Service, and System Magazine. She was part of the founding team of Vanity Fair Germany and is today Professor of Design Theory at Berlin’s Universität der Künste.

Harms first encountered Sander at sixteen, when she visited her first store in Hamburg in the early 1970s. Decades later, that encounter became a close professional relationship and a series of collaborations. Her perspective offers a rare glimpse into one of fashion’s most private and visionary figures.

The Fashion Archivist Podcast, hosted by Freya Roski, explores fashion through research, conversation, and archival material. Each episode combines interviews, monologues, and deep dives with previously unseen or unheard material to examine how fashion knowledge is formed, shared, and interpreted today.

The series looks at the people, ideas, and systems that shape contemporary fashion across design, media, retail, image-making, and culture.

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