By Seth Khouri
For decades, the artistic execution of menswear versus womenswear has remained fashion’s most circular debate. Some designers possess a rare fluency across both, translating a singular vision regardless of gender, think of the cohesive authorship exemplified by Jonathan Anderson at Dior. Others subscribe to a divide-and-conquer model, appointing separate creative leads to preserve distinction between the two. For Simone Bellotti, now at the helm of Jil Sander, the conversation feels particularly pointed: with a foundation in menswear and a reputation for disciplined tailoring, his sophomore collection arrives as a measured study in how that precision might evolve, or unravel, within a house defined by austere sensuality.
For his starting point, Bellotti references the Swedish photographer Anders Petersen’s black-and-white pictures of Café Lehmitz, a bar in Hamburg throughout the late 1960s. Here, he was drawn to the intimacy present within the images of patrons, their closeness and the distortion to silhouette it provided, letting that flow throughout the essence of the offering; “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.”
Made up of black, cream, and brown, the sixty-three-look collection held firm to a restrained colour palette (a critique of this Autumn-Winter fashion month). For Bellotti, the devil is in the detail, only to the trained eye attuned to nuance and restraint are his codes prevalent in full fruition. They emerged through a procession of androgynous suiting and architectural overcoats. In menswear, Oxford shirting peeked through necklines and armholes. Womenswear, by contrast, revealed a more flirtatious undercurrent: leopard-print pencil skirts (Look 32) and sweeping volumes offset the severity (Look 52), while bandeau tops (Look 45) and cut-out blazers (Look 35) carved moments of controlled exposure into the collection’s otherwise rigorous framework. While accessories remained largely restrained, Bellotti’s affinity for footwear (perhaps a quiet nod to his tenure at Bally) proved more declarative. Shoes grounded the collection with a sense of pragmatism, counterbalancing the intentional dissonance in cut and proportion.
Ultimately, Bellotti does not seek to collapse the divide between menswear and womenswear, nor to theatrically exaggerate it. Instead, he lingers in the tension between the two, allowing tailoring to fray at the edges, silhouettes to slip slightly off-centre, sensuality to emerge through precision rather than abandon. In doing so, his sophomore outing at Jil Sander reads not as a departure, but as a subtle destabilisation, a reminder that within restraint lies the possibility of rupture.
