Today in Milan, Simone Bellotti will show his second collection as the creative director of Jil Sander. A few weeks back, he was in New York, not to finalize the clothes—which he says were largely locked by then—but to introduce the brand’s new campaign, alongside model Guinevere van Seenus. Van Seenus, who once starred in the Craig McDean-shot campaigns that defined Jil Sander in the ’90s, had also opened Bellotti’s debut show for the label.
“It’s a brand that you really have to study,” he tells Nicole Phelps in this Wednesday’s episode of The Run-Through.
For fall, Bellotti’s mood board is organized around the idea of home—not as a sanctuary, but something more ambivalent. He’s been watching Rainer Werner Fassbinder films and exploring the way the director used interiors to create tension and unease, to make the familiar feel threatening. He’s also shifting his approach for the new collection: where his first show was about reduction, this one is about addition. “I love this idea of contradiction,” he says.
Jil Sander once described the mood of her work as like a “clear glass of water” or a “glass of red wine.” When asked to describe the mood of his own fall collection, Bellotti doesn’t miss a beat: it’s the olive in a martini. “It’s this extra thing that is apparently superfluous,” he says, “but it makes the cocktail perfect.” Listen to the whole conversation above.