Simone Bellotti’s first project as creative director at Jil Sander took him to the birthplace of the brand, the city of Hamburg where the founder still lives and rides her Bentley through town. Hamburg is much more than a city – it is also an ideology defined by the life in the beautiful villas behind the high walls along the Elbchaussee, the large windows of the Art Nouveau gems in Harvestehude and the rough air with its colorful containers around the harbor. Jil Sander channeled all of this into an upscale brand with global scale. A feminine will that was reflected in every perfectly tailored blazer, every pair of trousers, every shirt. She was the antithesis to restrictive, middle-class provinciality. Bellotti chose to engage in this dialogue between past and present when the new CEO Serge Brunschwig who joined only a few months ago from LVMH asked him to develop a project to communicate the start of his tenure.
Frames from Bellotti’s first JIL SANDER offering: A music video premiere in Hamburg
Simone Bellotti, Creative Director of JIL SANDER
Already at Bally, Bellotti showed an unusual talent for laying bare the roots of a brand. He brought back the unmistakable Swissness and made it cool and desirable. Karlheinz Weinberger and Fastnacht references went hand in hand with mini cowbells attached to black leather clothes. An audiophile and music fan, Bellotti decided to marry his first Jil Sander project to music from the beginning and found the little-known electronic music producer Gianluigi Di Costanzo who goes by the name Bochum Welt. He decided to support the production of an EP which came out on Apple Music and Spotify yesterday and he paired one of the tracks called Wanderlust with a video of a few new fresh faces exploring the port city in an old BMW and going about their own. Bellotti says: “The music conveys to me the feeling you have before going on summer holiday. The optimism of a season. That’s my entry point.”
Wanderlust by Bochum Welt for JIL SANDER
Wanderlust is loosely inspired by Wim Wenders who could be considered an expert of the sentiment both in a physical and metaphorical sense through his films. Wenders famously taught in Hamburg’s film school as well. Mixing all these strong German references and deciding to show them with an event in Hamburg bodes well for Bellotti’s real debut during Milan fashion week on September 24th. Then it’s about the clothes, as the video gave very few hints on what his Jil Sander might look like.
The EP is available as Vinyl in select JIL SANDER stores and online
