It’s been eight years since a Jil Sander show was held at the label’s Piazza Castello headquarters. Simone Bellotti arrived in March, with not so much as a day off between his former creative director job and his new one. Over the course of his four seasons at Bally, he became a fashion insider favorite, and his appointment here has produced the kind of excitement that has long gone missing from this brand.
The Jil assignment is a different proposition for him, though. At Bally, there was no legacy—no ready-to-wear one anyway. At Jil Sander? “Really, she has influenced so many others, all of us,” Bellotti said. And not only that: today, her late ’90s advertisements, starring a young Guinevere Van Seenus and Angela Lindvall, among others, are circulating widely online.
Van Seenus was the first model out this morning. Backstage, exhibiting the kind of class Sander was known for, Bellotti said his focus was “finding a balance between structure, tailoring, and classicism… and modernity and lightness, and trying to reveal the body in a subtle way. I really think Jil Sander has always had these two elements.”
Laying down his fundamentals, he reworked the famous Jil Sander double-face coats in an ultra-fine leather (worth seeing up close to admire the workmanship), and accented tailoring with little pleasures, like slits cut into trousers at the hipbones or a high vent at the back of a jacket that showed a flash of skin. On the other side of the structure/lightness divide, he embroidered a millefeuille of raw-edged silk to the front of a shift dress, or layered imperceptibly thin knit dresses in complementary colors one on top of another.
With Richard Prince’s “Hoods” series as an inspiration, Van Seenus’s white A-line skirt was constructed with inverse darting to give the impression of subtle geometric volume. Bellotti likened that detail to “modern armature.” Other skirts were sliced diagonally in a way that fans of Lucio Fontana might recognize, and dresses were cut with portholes on the torso, exposing the bras, one embroidered like chainmail, beneath.
Revealing the body doesn’t necessarily mean exposing the skin. Indeed, the frankness of these pieces might look foreign to Sander. So Bellotti also played with knits of different consistencies and shapes, slipping a “naive” shrunken-to-almost-kid-size sweater over a ski sweater with sleek rib, and pairing them with jeans. It seems unlikely, too, that Sander ever dabbled in denim on the runway, but styles have changed since she left the scene for the last time a dozen years ago. Also, Bellotti found a lot of success making clothes with real-world relevancy at his former gig.
On the real-world front, Bellotti’s shoes should get a shout. The glossy oxfords with the armature details at the toes, ballet flats with off-kilter vamps, and curved heel pumps—all distinctive—will make a strong foundation on which to build.
