Is it possible to take away while adding a personal signature? 

The question JIL SANDER creative director Simone Bellotti asked himself in his debut collection turns into an act of image-making in his first campaign, photographed by Stef Mitchell. 

Bellotti’s take on purism is one that trembles with the frisson of emotion behind the perfection of the surface. It’s fed on a dialogue of opposites: strictness and lightness, grace and severity, control and freedom.

The images are conceived in the same way, using the white, liminal space of the photographic studio as a springboard for tension and calm. In shaping a compelling visual language for the brand, image-making becomes a study of opposites — between protection and exposure, strength and vulnerability. 

“A curiosity for the body is what I am after - says Simone Bellotti - Posture and gesture as ways of communicating, clothes that invite to get close, that hide and reveal. Rationality and feelings”

The crops are decisive: mostly close, or from a distance, always focusing on the gestures and what these express in emotional and physical terms. Closeness, bonding, defiance, embracing all come to the fore. 

Eroticism is expressed by way of restraint - the charged space between what is hidden and what is shown. Poetry brings rhythm and sensitivity, transforming simplicity into emotion and gesture into meaning. Duality allows contrasts to coexist: hardness and softness, distance and closeness, body and object. 

The visual friction feels alive and intensely human. Images are distilled to their essence: a serenity electrified by tension and surprise, feeling at once intimate and assertive.  

A language of concealment and revelation unfolds. It speaks of beauty, emotion, and the quiet power of desire.