One Year Into Jil Sander, Simone Bellotti Started Unraveling His Own Minimalism

Simone Bellotti showed his Spring 2027 collection for Jil Sander in Milan on Wednesday morning, almost exactly a year after his debut at the house. The collection kept the label's core discipline — sharp tailoring, a controlled palette, monastic proportions — and then spent the rest of the show quietly undoing it.

The house's own show notes put the idea in a single line, reported by Wonderland: "The uniform becomes vulnerable. And vulnerability, in turn, becomes the uniform." That's a literal description of what was on the runway: pieces built like a uniform, then deliberately loosened, cut into or left unfinished.

The opening looks stayed close to Bellotti's known register — a collarless leather jacket buttoned from the neck to the navel, deep-V blazers, suit jackets with buttons set high near the collarbone, and slim, precisely cut trousers. From there the "wrongness" crept in: crinkled silk, scrunched jackets, jagged layers, three-button suits pulled into impossibly thin proportions, blazer waists left loosened rather than closed, and knits that looked like they were slipping off the body on purpose.

Two recurring moves stood out. Leopard print showed up deliberately mismatched piece to piece, rather than coordinated the way a print usually is. And cut-outs and exposed undergarments ran through several looks, including voluminous, cape-like dresses and a black leather dress-coat — pieces built for coverage that then showed skin or underlayers anyway.

The palette stayed mostly restrained — office neutrals and faded pastels — with pops of Yves Klein blue and a deep orange breaking up the otherwise controlled range of color. It's the same tension as the clothes: a tightly kept structure with a couple of things let loose inside it.

The show closed with a poem, read over the sound system, about flowers growing through concrete — W Magazine read it as a note of hope set against a harsher backdrop. Paired with the clothes, it reads as Bellotti's clearest statement yet of what he's doing with the house a year in: keeping Jil Sander's severity intact while making the case that a uniform can still show a crack.