For his first Jil Sander show last season, Simone Bellotti focused on reducing. “It was about searching for a very precise silhouette, very straight, very clean, removing fabric,” he said. For his second outing, he chose to do the opposite, adding a decorative ruffle down the side of pants, cutting a high slit into the back of a coat, splicing skirts provocatively at the seams, providing glimpses of white stockinged thigh underneath. He explained: “I was thinking, can something superfluous be considered essential?” In Bellotti’s hands, the answer is definitively yes.
With his menswear background, Bellotti is a tailor obsessed with nuance. This season he said he was looking at the Swedish photographer Anders Petersen’s black-and-white pictures of Café Lehmitz, a bar in Hamburg, Germany’s red light district circa the late 1960s. He was taken with the intimate images of its patrons, “the way they’re close to each other, and this kind of distortion that you will see in the collection: some suits come up in a way that’s a bit wrong, the collar looks like it’s falling in the back, the shoulders on a dress are detached from the body—they’re like clothes they want to run away from.”
The meticulousness with which he was able to evoke those gestures will have tailoring obsessives running towards Bellotti. Already in today’s audience, you could see how people have taken to the definitive lines, striking color combinations, and innovative materiality of his debut collection. He’s an insider’s designer, one whose subtleties can be read like signs by those in the know.
Here those subtleties included “banana” jackets and coats cut with a curve that, when buttoned, seemed to embrace the torso underneath, and skirts with waistbands that unpeeled asymmetrically as if caught in a state of partial undress, a lover waiting for a nod of consent to undo it further. Other skirts had arching cuts over one leg, an invitation that looked more cool than come hither. Much of the action was at the back. One particularly alluring dress that seemed to spill off the shoulders was built on a bustier foundation. Simple white tacking stitches held a lot of these pieces in place, an ostensibly dry detail that nonetheless held libidinous promise.
Jil Sander was once in the habit of likening her collections to drinks; one season it was a clear glass of water, another it was red wine. Asked to describe his new collection on Vogue’s Run-Through podcast, Bellotti said it was like “the olive in a martini, this extra thing that makes the cocktail perfect.” The man has a way with words, too. Undergirding all of these frivolities, if that’s what we must call them, was the promise of quite a sturdy shoe business. He made a fast success of his time at Bally with his footwear, and he seems poised to repeat that here. The pre-dirtied tan suede cowboy-ish boots looked Café Lehmitz-ready. In the showroom, the stretchy scuba shoes seen in black on the runway were arrayed in a variety of materials, including iridescent lurex. The biggest surprise were the Hitchcock pumps—visions of Tippi Hedren pumping the gas in The Birds—which were spliced in back like a lot of the clothes. A sexy Jill Sander? You better believe it.
