Can Simone Bellotti Save Minimalist Menswear?
This is an edition of the newsletter Show Notes, in which Samuel Hine reports from the front row of the fashion world. Sign up here to get it free.
The billion-dollar question facing fashion right now is: Can clothes be refined without being boring? Increasingly it feels like shoppers are faced with a binary choice. Say you want to buy a designer suit. Your options range from the greige and oversized (but not too oversized) to the totally wild and extra. Don’t get me wrong—there are exceptional clothes on both sides of that spectrum (looking at you, The Row and Luar), and menswear’s preppy agenda offers a way to look at things like classic tailoring with fresh eyes. But as this season’s shows keep ping-ponging between soporific and overly eccentric, it gives the impression that you have to compromise on personality for subtlety. Why can’t you have both?
Simone Bellotti thinks you can. In his debut for Jil Sander at Milan Fashion Week yesterday, the the cult-loved designer gave us sensually-shaped four-button blazers, superlight double-faced leather jackets, shrunken sweaters layered over other sweaters, shirts and overcoats with cool crinkled pleats at the waist, and sleek black leather moccasins. Not to mention the perfect pair of blue jeans. Stuff that fit impeccably, or didn’t fit in exactly the right way. Bellotti has clearly poured an exceptional amount of effort into his Jil Sander, but the clothes made it look easy.
photo: Alessandro Lucioni / Gorunway.com
photo: Alessandro Lucioni / Gorunway.com
Bellotti is a veteran of the battle for cool, wearable clothes. He spent 16 years at Gucci before decamping for Bally in 2022, where his vision of artful, boyish menswear turned him into a fashion insider favorite. (Kate Lanphear and Edward Buchanan, two hall of fame style icons, have both been wearing Bellotti’s hit Bally boat shoe this week.) When OTB chairman Renzo Rosso poached Bellotti for Jil Sander in March, it set up one of the most eagerly awaited debuts in a season full of them. Several editors told me it was the show they personally cared about the most—they wear more of Bellotti’s work than Dior or Chanel.
At Bally, a Swiss leather house with few existing ready-to-wear codes, Bellotti was able to start fresh. But his new job represents a much different challenge. After all, Jil Sander is synonymous with minimalism. The “Queen of Less” pioneered fashion that prioritized the wearer over design flourishes, preaching a gospel of radical restraint and clean lines. It’s a daunting legacy and a bit of a paradox. As Bellotti ruminated to Vogue in the run-up to the show: “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?”
photo: Alessandro Lucioni / Gorunway.com
photo: Alessandro Lucioni / Gorunway.com
I spotted a step in the right direction before the first model even hit the runway. A few of Bellotti’s friends in the front row were wearing handsome navy leather trainers—a reissue of the Puma x Jil Sander King, a groundbreaking 1998 design that is considered the first sneaker collaboration between a luxury designer and a major athletic brand. I was starting to imagine lines forming outside of Jil Sander stores for the first time since the Raf Simons era, and that was before Bellotti revealed his other surefire It shoe: those great leather mocs, which look like a Wallabee mated with a made-in-Italy driving loafer.
Bellotti also embraced tradition—or stripped things back?—by returning the show to the brand’s stark white headquarters, a stone’s throw from the medieval Castello Sforzesco. Backstage, Bellotti recalled the aha moment he had on his first day in the office. “They asked me to do a speech in the office, and I was so nervous, I didn’t even know what I was saying,” he said. “And I was in this space, which is super modern, light, and white. I was looking outside at this castle, which is massive and classic. And basically, I thought, the brand is this. It’s the combination of these elements that apparently are opposite, but I think they speak the same language.”
