A Different Jil Sander, but True to Itself—Simone Bellotti Outlines His Path

Simone Bellotti is Zooming in from a small office space that doubles as a kind of closet. Some designer offices have views, others have expensive art. The new Jil Sander creative director, fresh from a reputation-making stint at Bally, has racks of clothes—dozens of garments, by the looks of it. “Real stuff,” he says. “It’s basically all mine, and I don’t have space at home to keep all of it.” A highly relatable situation. “Sometimes I use them as references to try to do something new. I know this is not very minimal, but it’s nice that from this, you can edit and edit and try to find different languages.”

Bellotti is Italian, and he interned and apprenticed at Carol Christian Poell and AF Vandevorst in Antwerp before a string of jobs in Milan landed him at Gucci, where he worked first un