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Simone Bellotti is Zooming in from a small office space that doubles as a kind of closet. Some designer offices have views, others have expensive art. The new Jil Sander creative director, fresh from a reputation-making stint at Bally, has racks of clothes—dozens of garments, by the looks of it. “Real stuff,” he says. “It’s basically all mine, and I don’t have space at home to keep all of it.” A highly relatable situation. “Sometimes I use them as references to try to do something new. I know this is not very minimal, but it’s nice that from this, you can edit and edit and try to find different languages.”
Bellotti is Italian, and he interned and apprenticed at Carol Christian Poell and AF Vandevorst in Antwerp before a string of jobs in Milan landed him at Gucci, where he worked first under Frida Giannini and then Alessandro Michele. Bally, where he introduced the wildly popular and trend-setting boat shoe that made his name in his very first season at the label, is a Swiss company. He knows from different languages. Now his task is to learn Jil Sander’s German.
The brand has had a good number of designer voices over the years, but they didn’t always speak in the Jil Sander vernacular. Raf Simons, by the end of his career-making run, had adopted the dialect of couture; Luke and Lucie Meier were well-versed in #oldCeline. In fact, Sander herself was a minimalist in a way we might not recognize now, after years of quiet luxury. Her work had a spareness and austerity that never dampened its sense of cool.
Bellotti is an apt pupil: studious and methodical, it would seem, but also a bit dreamy. “Pure is a word that she was always saying, and this is something that really interests me a lot,” he says. “Jil Sander is a brand that, for me, represents a way of being. This continuous search for the essence, this search for purity, is something very aligned to what I like.”
For his opening act at the label this summer, Bellotti went back to the source, in a manner of speaking, producing a limited edition EP by the Italian composer Gianluigi Di Costanzo, who goes by the name Bochum Welt—it sold out, Bellotti proudly reports—and an accompanying music video, shot in Jil Sander’s native Hamburg. He visited the German city for its launch party. “When you go there, you understand many things about this brand, because the city has this very, let’s say, elegant side, very classic. But at the same time, there’s also something a bit unusual and controversial and industrial. The port, the water, the light is crazy.”
Having watched his trajectory, it seems certain there’ll be an undercurrent of something at Bellotti’s Jil Sander. A charcoal gray dress on his final Bally runway lingers in the mind: It was as prim as can be from the front with a below-the-knee hem and a collar that nearly grazed the chin; only when it turned did the emerald green shearling panel that wiggled down its back reveal itself.
As for what the something will be, Bellotti admits to a dilemma: “I’m always asking myself since I started here: what can I add of myself to a brand that is known to reduce? What can I add in a brand that goes to the essence?” Then he relates an illuminating story about his first day at the company: “I was asked to do a speech and I was very nervous. We were in the showroom: a beautiful space, super-clean, all-white, with these huge windows overlooking the Piazza Castello.” (It’s where the show will be held, a space not used for such an occasion in eight years). “I was looking outside at the castle and I started to think: maybe there’s something in this brand that is really light and modern, and at the same time, you have something which is more austere that gives you a kind of protection in a way.”
On his moodboard at fittings two days before the show, Bellotti had pinned up images highlighting this dichotomy: one of a Richard Prince carhood-turned-art piece from his Hoods series (a symbol for control) and another of artists Scheltens Abbenes’s glossy magazine books, which Bellotti discovered doing extensive brand research (representing freedom). These pieces directly inspired looks in the collection, but he’ll also get down to the nuts and bolts of Jil Sander: the tailoring, the double-face construction of jackets and coats. “This brand can give you the possibility to really do a very elevated product,” he says. “The idea to work with this very high level of craftsmanship of fabrics—I really believe this is something that can make the difference.”
If Jil Sander’s word was pure, Simone Bellotti’s just might be honest. “What’s difficult for fashion today is maybe the hyper-visibility of everything. We are surrounded all the time with so much information, that maybe this makes people less curious. When you are in these fluxes of continuous images and information, maybe there are so many things in your brain that in the end, you forget about it.” But honest product—“if it’s expensive it has to look expensive,” he says—now, that’s something people notice and pay attention to.
It’s a safe bet people will be paying attention to Bellotti’s shoes: A glossy patent oxford has the sharp contours of one of Prince’s hoods, while a crepe-soled desert boot looks like a distant (fancier) cousin of his best-selling Bally topsider. But don’t sleep on his double-face leather jackets and coats, which are “very high quality,” if he does say so himself. “This kind of leather, it’s top, and I’ve had the chance to work in very good brands.” The Jil job is bigger than any he’s had before, but Bellotti is bringing the same mix of poetry and purpose to the role. “Everyone has their own idea of Jil. To me, if Jil Sander can be a resource for people who are in search of something that has a quality… To see this type of product in our store, I will be happy.”
