Opening day two of Milan Fashion Week, Simone Bellotti has just presented his third collection for Jil Sander, staged at the brand’s HQ in the heart of the city.
The thinking behind a creative director’s work when they take a new seat can often feel elusive, even ominous. But at Jil Sander, where purity and rigour have long been the house’s language, Bellotti’s vision is becoming crystal clear.
His first collection was an exercise in subtraction, paring everything back to the essentials. Clean cuts, precision in tailoring informed by his menswear background, and garments whose craftsmanship spoke for itself. Simple, never simplistic. For his follow-up, he pushed in the opposite direction: cut-outs appeared across skirts, dresses swelled with volume, coats opened into long slits and skin became part of the equation, offset by opaque white tights. And then there was that delicious leopard-print skirt.
Today, however, felt like an opening into a new dimension of Bellotti’s work, a glimpse of what might exist between those two poles. The continuity was unmistakable. Suits retained their three-button measure, impossibly thin, delicate leather took the shape of very desirable jackets, and the voluminous dresses returned, only now pushed further, taking on the exaggerated proportions of a cape. The leopard motif evolved into a fully printed, deliberately mismatched look, while an intricate study of creasing travelled across silk.
The ideas of home, house and who inhabits what have been intrinsic to Belotti’s work at Jil Sander. For his latest AW campaign, models interacted with furniture placed on the runway of a private airport, disrupting the natural simplicity of the domestic object by transplanting it somewhere unexpected. Now, he’s questioning that same simplicity from the wearer’s perspective, looking at the idea of the uniform.
“The uniform becomes vulnerable. And vulnerability, in turn, becomes the uniform,” read the show notes. It’s a trip of distortions. The first model emerged with bare legs, wearing little more than a black leather dress-coat. Shortly after, a knit slipped from a shoulder; cleavage broke through a button-down; blazer waists were pinned back to expose the undergarments beneath. Colour is introduced. Familiar forms were loosened, disrupted and deconstructed, introducing an element of imperfection into an otherwise meticulously controlled wardrobe.
For a house with such codes, the undone is, perhaps, as freaky as it gets. And in their state of nonchalance, models became the best-dressed people you’ll ever see in any room. And oh, so sexy. “Faced with what feels incoherent, one understands more clearly what one wants.” At Bellotti’s Jil Sander, the things that shouldn’t quite work somehow do.
Words – Sofia Ferreira
