In 1994, German fashion designer Jil Sander commissioned Michael Gabellini to conceive her Milanese HQ, which would occupy a former palazzo and cinema on the city’s Piazza Castello. The architect had recently designed Sander’s inaugural Paris store, housed in a Beaux-Arts building on Avenue Montaigne originally built for Count de Lariboisière in 1890 and later occupied by the French couturier Madeleine Vionnet. Retaining its regal façade, the interior was transformed with what Gabellini would describe as ‘radical simplicity’ – linear planes of limestone, flooded light, floating surfaces – a reflection of Sander’s approach to clothing, which saw her strip away the extraneous in search of a purity of design (though she is most associated with minimalism, she has always eschewed the label, preferring the terms ‘pure’ and ‘modern’ when describing her work).
The Milanese HQ was built on a similar conceit. Within the building’s neoclassical shell, the interiors are an exercise in cool restraint: ascending a two-storey staircase, adorned with matte nickel hardware, guests reach a reception room that leads to a vast limestone promenade connecting the various rooms. It also takes you into the space’s nexus: a sunken, multi-use ‘theatre’, used, at turns, as a photography studio, meeting space, showroom and setting for the house’s runway shows. The offices are beautifully empty: so much so that the views of the neighbouring Castello Sforzesco – its Renaissance grandeur glimpsed through the arched windows that line the space – become a form of decoration.
The HQ has served as something of a muse for the Italian designer Simone Bellotti, who became the house’s creative director in early 2025 after a brief but acclaimed stint at Swiss brand Bally. His time there, from 2022-2025, saw him deemed a fashion editors’ favourite for collections that married rigour and restraint with off-kilter silhouettes – jaunting peplums, sloping shoulders, raised-up necklines – and an influence of subculture (his heavy use of leather drew on the work of Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger, renowned for his portraiture of local teen biker gangs in the 1950s and 1960s). He also spawned a handful of successful accessories for the brand, including the ‘Plume’, a loafer-cum-boat shoe that remains ubiquitous in style circles today.
Taking over from husband-and-wife duo Luke and Lucie Meier, who exited Jil Sander in early 2025, one of Bellotti’s first moves was to bring the house’s runway shows back into the space. He would show his debut S/S 2026 collection at the HQ in September 2025, part of a watershed season shared with numerous other creative director debutants (15 designers began their tenures across the various fashion cities, including Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Jonathan Anderson at Dior). ‘I was interested to see all this excitement about what was happening in fashion,’ says Bellotti. ‘It was almost like people talking about football teams. I think it’s good for the industry.’
For that first show, models – including Guinevere van Seenus, a Jil Sander muse who memorably appeared in the house’s seminal Craig McDean-shot campaigns in the late 1990s – walked the length of the HQ, before dipping into its central theatre via a slanted runway clad in industrial studded black rubber. Clean and precise, the setting was a reflection of the collection itself, which Bellotti described as an attempt to return Jil Sander to its essence.
‘There is always this tension between something traditional, like masculine tailoring, and the need to make it light and open’
Simone Bellotti
‘I remember my first day. I was nervous because they asked me to do a speech for the whole staff,’ he says. ‘We were in the headquarters, on the Castello side. When you are there, you start to understand what the brand is; you get this sense of light and modernity. But at the same time, there is the view of the castle, which is so classic. I realised Jil Sander is about the mix of these elements – when you go deeper into the archive, there is always this tension between something traditional, like masculine tailoring, and the need to make it light and open.’
As if a metaphor, several garments from the first collection were sliced across their surface, which critics likened to the work of Italian artist Lucio Fontana, though Bellotti says they were simply an attempt to capture the spirit of the brand: ‘Jil Sander is about showing and revealing the skin, the humanity, the body, and letting it breathe.’
Indeed, from the earliest days of the label (Sander opened a boutique in Hamburg in the late 1960s before creating her first official collection in 1973), the eponymous designer sought to streamline the clothing that surrounded her growing up in midcentury Germany. ‘People had a sense for cuts and quality fabrics. What was lacking in my view was modernity,’ she said in 2024 (in a Wallpaper* interview, as her monograph, Jil Sander by Jil Sander, was released). ‘Looking back, I realise I was part of a broader reawakening that influenced my childhood in Hamburg,’ she continued, referencing Germany’s rebuilding after the destruction of war and Nazi rule. ‘I was witness to a democratic reconstruction, a clearing away of anything standing in the way of a better future.’ (Sander would work at the house until 2000; returning briefly in 2003 for just over a year, and later in 2012, months after the exit of Belgian designer Raf Simons, before leaving again in 2013.)
The first garment Bellotti remembers designing at Jil Sander was a blue sweater, an addition to a pre-collection that had already been largely designed: ‘It was very simple, with a nice detail at the collar, very classic – like a T-shirt in wool’. Similar sweaters, contoured to the body and in colour-blocked shades, appeared in his first runway show, alongside crisp, shrunken tailoring, double-faced leather coats and blue jeans, while an intriguing eye for pattern-cutting led to jutting skirts inspired by Richard Prince’s Hoods, a series of paintings that used the bonnets of muscle cars as undulating metal canvases. The outward simplicity of other garments belied the hours of craft they took to construct – like a series of dresses and skirts made from hundreds of layers of organza-like fabric that fluttered open ‘like the pages of a book’.
Even if the final result is different, Bellotti says such attention to detail was influenced by the time he spent under Alessandro Michele at Gucci, a designer known for his maximalist collections that drew from the opulent annals of history (Bellotti was at Gucci for 16 years, working with Frida Giannini before Michele). ‘The approach is not so different,’ says Bellotti, who will often spend weeks researching fabric or perfecting a garment’s cut. ‘It takes an extraordinary amount of work to make something look simple.’
Looking back now, almost a year later, he sees the first collection as a palate cleanser. ‘The first show was about reducing and building a base to work on; it was important to do something that was precise and light. But with my second collection, I wanted to try and do the opposite. I always had this question in my mind: what can I add to a brand that is famous for reduction? So I thought about adding fabric, a useless amount of fabric behind the coat or the dress. I was [wondering] if something superficial can become essential.’
It led to an A/W 2026 collection, shown in February in Milan, that evolved the stark simplicity of his debut with flourishes of colour and texture: the vivid blue of a pair of tights appeared from beneath a tailored trouser, a pencil skirt came in leopard print, while a series of padded ‘mattress’ dresses saw Bellotti inspired by his late father’s career as an upholsterer. Other pieces were purposely worn in to make the collection appear ‘more real’ – a pair of scuffed suede pumps looked like they had taken a turn on the dancefloor – while an undercurrent of sensuality, evoked in slashes running the length of a skirt or dresses that appeared to be perpetually slipping off the shoulder, drew on Anders Petersen’s photographs of Café Lehmitz in Hamburg’s red light district in the late 1960s and early 1970s. ‘I’ve mainly worked with menswear, and it’s fun to work on womenswear and see all of the possibilities. I think it’s important to have something superficial,’ he said, likening the collection to an ‘olive in a martini’.
‘What can I add to this brand? How far can I go, and what is the moment to stop?’
Simone Bellotti
Another thematic thread was the idea of home: in a nod to the domestic, a rust-coloured carpet was laid the length of the Jil Sander HQ, which Bellotti chose once again as the setting for the sophomore show. ‘A home is a place one might seek refuge in or want to flee from,’ read the collection notes, a tension explored in Italian author and filmmaker Chiara Barzini’s The House above the Sea, a poem read by Kim Gordon as the show’s soundtrack. ‘We roamed the streets and crossed the bridges and then the oceans / We took trains and rides from strangers / Only to be home again... Escape and return are the same,’ it reads.
‘I think the idea of home was related to the idea of a house, a fashion house,’ says Bellotti, who describes the task of a creative director as a constant balance between reverence and departure. How do you live in a house that someone else has built? ‘When we are at home, if we are lucky enough to have a home, and even if we love it, sometimes we need to escape, to explore something new. What can I add to this brand? How far can I go, and what is the moment to stop? It takes a lot of experimentation and time. It’s psychological.’
A version of this article appears in the September 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.
All clothing from the A/W 2026 collection by Jil Sander (jilsander.com). Models: Marie De Clercq at Fabbrica Milano, Modu Fall at Elite Model Management. Casting: Suun Consulting. Hair: Daniele Falzone at Blend Mgmt using Phyto Paris. Make-up: Luciano Chiarello at Julian Watson Agency. Photography assistant: Kevin Ramos. Fashion assistant: Florencia Greco. Local production: Giacomo Barbon at Circus Studios.
