Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Courtesy of Fendi, Jil Sander, Diesel
With slits and openings, a shimmer of white satin beneath a black wool coat, the clothing of Jil Sander invites you to touch. There’s also a poor or lower-class quality in some of the designs — the work of Simone Bellotti, who became creative director of Sander last year. The brown suede boots shown with dark tailoring look scuffed, common. The backs of suede pumps appear broken or secondhand, and the girls’ tights aren’t white; they’re dirty white.
There’s a subtle, welcomed dirtiness in Bellotti’s new collection, shown on Wednesday in Milan. The more you look at the clothes, the more you see it. The way a tan leather pencil skirt peels off the waist, heightening the tension of the model’s flesh-colored bodysuit and red lips. A totally elegant double-breasted coat dress in light-brown wool that nonetheless reveals the model’s thighs and those grimy-white tights. Bellotti is deepening our understanding of minimalism and Jil Sander, a brand founded in Hamburg that produced its first women’s collection in 1973. And one thing it is not — or, at least, doesn’t always need to be — is “clean.”
From left: Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Jil SanderPhoto: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Jil Sander
From top: Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Jil SanderPhoto: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Jil Sander
“I think there’s always been a sensuality to Jil Sander,” Bellotti told me. “Not in a sexy way but in a ‘come close to me’ way.”
That distinction, and the deceptions that Bellotti visually created in this beguiling collection, now push him to the forefront of Milan fashion and restore a pulse to the brand. It has been 20 years since Raf Simons showed audiences what was possible with a minimalist icon — in color, form, and cultural frisson. Bellotti is doing that in his own way, and I find his thought process, his use of small gestures and restraint, extremely interesting and relevant.
Bellotti says he looked at a number of references, most notably Café Lehmitz, a book of photographs by Anders Petersen taken in the ’60s of patrons of a bar in Hamburg. “Gianfranco Ferré had the book in his library. He had an amazing library.” Born in 1978, Bellotti once worked for Ferré. He also rewatched movies by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Since the Italian Renaissance, down through Sade and Dickens, artists have been looking at street characters, including prostitutes and criminals. Two years ago, in his final show for Margiela, John Galliano drew upon the nighttime figures in Brassai’s images of the 1930s. The setting for his show was a bar. Bellotti comes at this feeling from an angle rather than straight on. You see it in the drab toughness of a black leather car coat, or a leather blazer worn with a turf-brown suede skirt, or the hem of a cream satin skirt peeking out from a coat.
From left: Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Jil SanderPhoto: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Jil Sander
From top: Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Jil SanderPhoto: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Jil Sander
In other words, Bellotti doesn’t belabor the down and dirty. You have to look for it, and in that way, I think, he keeps things human and honest. People are contradictory; so are their clothes. Also, we don’t need more bourgeois-looking fashion.
Maria Grazia Chiuri, the former creative director of Dior, is now at Fendi, though in a sense very little has changed. She stuck to her palette of mostly black with touches of white and khaki and a spark of yellow — in contrast to the tangy colors of her predecessor, Silvia Venturini Fendi. She delivered an understated uniform, good in any port — suits in black lightweight wool, belted coats in textured black velvet, a white cotton shirt with an A-line black lace skirt, and vests trimmed with fur and embroidered with beads or tiny flowers made from fur scraps. And she styled her clothes with black anklets and heels.
From left: Photo: Courtesy of FendiPhoto: Courtesy of Fendi
From top: Photo: Courtesy of FendiPhoto: Courtesy of Fendi
Photo: Courtesy of Fendi
But apart from redoing some of Fendi’s bags — making the Baguette softer, sharpening the logo — almost none of Chiuri’s ideas were new. She spoke of a “shared” wardrobe between women and men, sending out virtual twins in black suits, but the idea is obviously outdated, and she didn’t attempt to further it.
In contrast to Bellotti, who used slits and openings to imply touch and intimacy, Chiuri confined the fur to chunky jackets and those anemic trimmings. The texture of fur against the body is sensual, and it has been as such at Fendi in the past. But not here.
Football scarves done in collaboration with the artist SAGG Napoli were a rare bit of whimsy. But perhaps the oddest thing about this show was that though Chiuri aligned the brand with artists, as she did at Dior, there was no sense of culture. You’d have to remind yourself that Fendi is based in Rome, because the culture was chased out by Chiuri’s adamant sense of pragmatism.
On Tuesday, Diesel gathered up the detritus from past shows together with stuff collected by the company’s chief, Renzo Rosso, including some adorable early-model Fiats, and spread them over the center of Glenn Martens’s runway. If the pile suggested a hoarder or a trashed hotel room, you are close. As Martens described his aim this season, with a huge laugh, “It’s about engaging in your most shameful walk of shame and making it famous.” You wake up in a hotel room; you don’t know how you got there (or with whom). “You get dressed without washing, and you look hot!”
From left: Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of DieselPhoto: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Diesel
From top: Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of DieselPhoto: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Diesel
Photo: Filippo Fior / Gorunway.com / Courtesy of Diesel
Nearly everything rode that pony without exhausting it, the best bits being boiled knits that looked permanently wrinkled, scuffed and crinkled Japanese denim, and some sweet separates in floral intarsia. Martens, who is also the creative director of Margiela, said the brand will skip the upcoming Paris shows in order to do a four-city presentation of Margiela in China. And he plans to move its couture show from July to the January session.