Let go and let Jil: Simone Bellotti cracks the Sander polish
For Spring-Summer 2027, Simone Bellotti disrupted Jil Sander’s clinical precision with vulnerability and imperfection. Anders Christian Madsen reviews the show.
You know when you see a person who’s super neat, like really ironed and clean-cut, and you think, I’d quite like to dress like that, but you know you’d just mess it up? Enter: Simone Bellotti’s third show for Jil Sander. If you’re one of those people – and not blessed with the capacity to stay perpetually uncreased – this collection was a kind of feel-good therapy for the imperfect. “Distorting the precision,” he reflected backstage. “I think it’s more honest.” Over 63 looks presented in the house’s clinical headquarters by the Castello Sforzesco, Bellotti slowly let the purified, polished, perfect Jil Sander ideal come apart. Within his measured silhouettes, shirts started poking out of tops and trousers, fabric began to crease and buttons were done up unevenly.
Eventually, the constructions themselves went mad, abstracted left and right in weird and wonderful materials, sudden colours and landscape motifs appeared, and formidable shapes materialised, until, boom! Bellotti stopped, composed himself and brought the collection back to its neat outset. “What’s interesting about Jil is that you have to learn how to dose your impulses and find the right moment to say you’re happy and done,” he reflected. What the designer wanted to convey was the vulnerability that naturally exists within the minimal uniform of Jil Sander, because that kind of perfection can so easily crack: “Uniforms are something connected to an idea of huge power. But it would be nice to think that a uniform could be represented by fragility. Probably, I’m naïve to think this,” Bellotti shrugged.
Uniforms are something connected to an idea of huge power. But it would be nice to think that a uniform could also be represented by fragility.
Simone Bellotti
“It’s part of the DNA of the brand, this precision tailoring – very sharp – but through manipulation and distortion and imperfection, I would like to think about a uniform that is vulnerable and fragile,” he concluded. Bellotti is not a designer who waxes lyrical about the state of the world and how his work reflects it. But maybe he should. Within this show was not only a practical relatability, but a deeper emotional one: a message about the beauty of imperfection, honesty and compassion in a social climate where toughness is synonymous with pretending everything is always great. His beautiful, emotive techno soundtrack – Pavel Milyakov’s Buttechno – certainly didn’t make it worse.
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