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.

And the precision with which he translated that feeling? OH MY GOD. Tailoring obsessives, prepare to sprint. You could already sense it in the room—people clocking the lines, the color combinations, the materials—recognizing that Bellotti is very much an insider’s designer. The kind where the clues are small, but once you see them, you see them.

Those clues came in the form of “banana” jackets and coats—cut on a curve so that when buttoned, they gently hugged the torso, like an embrace you didn’t realize you needed. Skirts with waistbands that peeled away asymmetrically, as if caught mid-undressing—paused, waiting, respectful but charged. Other skirts arched over one leg, not so much come-hither as quietly confident. Cool. Most of the real action happened at the back: dresses spilling off the shoulders, anchored secretly by bustier constructions underneath. White tacking stitches—normally such a dry, utilitarian detail—were left visible, holding things together just barely. Functional, yes. But also… loaded.

There’s a long-standing Jil Sander tradition of describing collections as drinks—clear water one season, red wine another. Asked to sum up this one on Vogue’s Run-Through podcast, Bellotti said it was like “the olive in a martini.” That extra thing. The detail you don’t need—but without it, the whole thing falls flat. And honestly? Nailed it.

Underneath all the flirtation, there was something very grounded anchoring the collection: shoes. Bellotti already proved at Bally that he knows how to build a footwear business, and he’s clearly lining that up here too. Pre-dirtied tan suede, cowboy-ish boots looked perfectly Café Lehmitz-ready. The stretchy scuba shoes seen on the runway showed up in the showroom in multiple materials, including iridescent lurex. And then—the surprise hit—the Hitchcock pumps. Split at the back like many of the clothes, evoking Tippi Hedren in The Birds. Tense. Elegant. Slightly dangerous.

A sexy Jil Sander? Yeah. Believe it.