In his third collection for the OTB-owned house, Simone Bellotti pushed the button stance to the throat and left the waist seams to pucker, testing whether a brand whose proposition is exact construction can sell an imperfection it chose on purpose. The version that reaches the floor, the designer indicated, will be the easier one
MILAN — Simone Bellotti showed his third collection for Jil Sander on Sept. 23 at the house’s Piazza Castello headquarters, and used it to put a deliberate flaw in the uniform. Trim single-breasted jackets had their button stance moved up toward the throat; coats and tailored jackets were suppressed at the waist, the seams left to pucker.
The question the collection raised is commercial rather than philosophical. Can a house whose proposition is exact construction sell an imperfection it chose on purpose?
The Collection’s Central Idea
Bellotti targeted not the tailoring but the meaning attached to it. “The uniform is always associated with being tough and strong and powerful,” he said backstage, describing a collection built to bring fragility to clothes that have signaled authority since Jil Sander was founded in Hamburg in 1968.
The mechanism was a raised button stance. Two buttons sat near the collar on the looser double-breasted jackets, and the trim single-breasted models closed high across the chest, drawing the shoulders in and letting the jacket front swing free.
That is a change of posture, not of silhouette. A suit that still looks buttoned-up now reads as withdrawn, and no other adjustment in the show carried as much.
Silhouette and Styling
Bellotti kept to a classic spine of tailored jackets, tailored coats, dress trousers and pencil skirts, and worked inside that vocabulary rather than around it. Volume came from the hem instead. Built-in capes were added to slim dresses cut with bubble hems, which puffed away from the body as the models moved through the narrowly spaced benches of the headquarters.
Fabrics were light across the line, a spring register the house held even where the tailoring was at its most constructed.
The House Codes
The house was founded in Hamburg in 1968, showed its first womenswear collection in 1973 and added menswear in 1997. Its reputation rests on subtraction, which is why a button moved a few centimeters up the chest is a larger move here than it would be almost anywhere else on the Milan calendar.
Bellotti arrived from Bally in early 2025, succeeding Lucie and Luke Meier, who had designed the house since 2017. He changed the codes he inherited rather than rewriting them: the shoulder stayed sharp, the waist stayed controlled, and the collection’s argument sat in the positioning of two buttons.
What Worked
The tailoring held its line. The construction the house has sold for years stayed intact, and the most convincing exit was its least eventful: a trim jacket and dress trousers unchanged in silhouette, altered only in where they buttoned.
The classic spine was the right commercial call. Tailored jackets, tailored coats, dress trousers and pencil skirts are what the Jil Sander customer already walks in for, and Bellotti did not make her hunt for them.
The capes solved a specific problem: how to release volume in a house that does not do drape. On the slim, bubble-hemmed dresses, they puffed away from the body, giving the daywear a second idea that never competed with the tailoring.
Where It Faltered
The waist suppression was the weakest argument on the runway. Bellotti gathered coats and tailored jackets at the waist, and the resulting puckering did not always flatter. He did not contest the point, saying the pieces would be difficult for some customers and pointing to other solutions waiting in the showroom.
That concession is worth weighing. The collection’s central idea arrived on the runway in its full form and will reach the floor already edited for ease, so part of the vulnerability the show was organized around is a runway proposition rather than a retail one.
The construction also asks a great deal of the wearer. A jacket buttoned to the throat and gathered at the hip is harder to sell than the same jacket cut straight, and Bellotti’s own habit of wearing blue jeans suggests he knows which version gets worn.
Jil Sander is owned by OTB, Renzo Rosso’s Italian group, which bought 100 percent of the brand in March 2021; the seller, the Japanese conglomerate Onward Holdings, had paid 167 million euros for it in 2008. The brand’s last published revenue figure, for 2023, was 148 million euros, and OTB does not break out the label’s performance against its siblings, so the runway read must rest on identity rather than figures.
The group backdrop is not generous. OTB’s net sales fell 5.9 percent to 1.6 billion euros in 2025, EBITDA slipped 14 percent to 237.3 million euros, and the growth inside the portfolio came from Maison Margiela and Diesel rather than from the lujo labels at the top of the mix.
That makes margin the question that counts. Jil Sander’s beauty business sits with Coty under an extended license that moves the brand into ultra-premium fragrance for the first time across 10 years, the licensed category where a house’s codes have to travel without a fitting. A collection that deliberately complicates the uniform is a runway statement and a risk on the floor. OTB’s numbers are made on the floor.
Bellotti has now spent three collections teaching Jil Sander to look less sure of itself. The tailoring still holds, and the range shows a designer fluent in the house’s vocabulary. What the show left open is whether the customer who buys Jil Sander for its exactness wants that exactness complicated.
Bellotti’s answer is that she will not have to choose. The difficult version stays on the runway; the easy one waits in the showroom.
See the complete collection below:
Images courtesy of Jil Sander
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