For his first outing at Jil Sander last season, Simone Bellotti was in full reduction mode. Strip it back. Pare it down. Get obsessed with line. “Very straight, very clean, removing fabric,” he said at the time. This season? He did the opposite. And not in a chaotic way—in a deliberate, almost teasing way. Ruffles snaked down the sides of trousers. Coats were slashed high up the back. Skirts were split open at the seams just enough to flash a white-stockinged thigh. He put it plainly: “Can something superfluous be considered essential?” And in his hands, the answer is… absolutely yes. Bellotti comes from menswear, which means tailoring is his native language—and nuance is his obsession. This season, he’d been deep in the black-and-white photographs of Anders Petersen, specifically his images of Café Lehmitz, a bar in Hamburg’s red-light district in the late 1960s. The thing that stuck with him wasn’t grime or decadence so much as intimacy. Bodies close. Clothes slipping. That slightly off-kilter feeling when nothing is quite sitting where it’s supposed to. “Some suits come up wrong,” he said. “The collar looks like it’s falling in the back. The shoulders on a dress are detached from the body.” Clothes, basically, that want to escape.