What is power dressing? Every few years it seems like there is a different answer to that question. Some more convincing than others.
On Wednesday in Milan one came from Simone Bellotti, the new creative director at Jil Sander. Temptingly, and with a fitting amount of conviction.
It was in the late 1990s, after all, that Jil Sander herself first redefined the term, transforming it from a synonym for big shoulders and bigger gold buttons into one for minimalist chic.
In so doing, she also made her equally unadorned suits or coats or sweaters into the equivalent of a secret handshake for women in the C-suite. The designer’s trademark was stripping away the excess to suggest that the essence of a garment and, by implication, the person who wore it, was enough. Her clothes celebrated clarity of thought and the power of the tiny detail, even as they dared to look deceptively boring from afar. They were like the sartorial antidote to mansplaining (even for men).
Since Ms. Sander walked off the high fashion stage in 2013, however, those qualities have been largely missing from the runways. There have been designers who embraced the sort of subtlety that Ms. Sander espoused (Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen of the Row and Phoebe Philo among them), but the security of doing less to convey more has mostly been traded for the immediate gratification of clothes florid enough to shout “Me! Me! Me!” through the prism of a smartphone screen.
At least until Mr. Bellotti, the former Bally designer, made his debut, returning the house to form. Well, everything else 1990s is being rediscovered. It’s about time this was, too.
Mr. Bellotti did it by literally bringing the brand back to its home: the light-filled, white-wall headquarters overlooking the medieval Castello Sforzesco. He did it by inviting Guinevere Van Seenus, the American model who famously embodied the Sander ethos for an ad campaign in 1996, to open his show.
And he did it with the fashion equivalent of a digital detox: clothes that conveyed a sense of quiet control and efficiency, with a flash of idiosyncrasy up close.
In the age of the influencer, just saying no to decoration is a serious muscle move.
Mr. Bellotti started by picking one silhouette (small shoulders, slim line) and then subverting it ever so slightly: changing the proportions, skewing the perspective, adding a wackadoodle shoe.
Single-breasted car coats had their lapels downsized and foreshortened, so that they resembled Peter Pan collars that had been put through the wringer. Neat three-button pantsuits came in a crepe that rendered them soft, like pajamas, with the buttons raised closer to the breastbone than the waist and the vent in the back sliced equally high, to show some spine. For both men and women.
Crew necks in red and blue that seemed to have gotten shrunk to child size in the wash were layered over skintight ribbed polo knits in contrasting colors that acted like something of a corset between sweater hem and trousers. A sleeveless shift dress in grape double-face leather — a decadent concept if there ever was one — had an origami crease down the middle.
Even more provocatively, prim pencil skirts were slashed on the diagonal from below the knee to the thigh to provide a glimpse underneath, and waistbands had been detached just a centimeter or so at each hip from otherwise sedate pant legs. Peekaboo.
There wasn’t a bugle bead or a frill in sight, though there were multiple strips of chiffon sewn, one atop the other, on the front of an otherwise simple shift to mimic a ream of paper seen from the side. When the model walked, the edges seemed to undulate, changing color as she moved. As embellishments go, it was awfully analog.
Especially paired with supple leather Wallabee-esque footwear, and kitten-heel lace-ups polished to an almost metallic sheen and molded so the toes turned up at the tip like a vintage racecar. Or a vestigial horn.
In case, you know, you really needed to make an elegant getaway, or kick some whatever, IRL.
Vanessa Friedman has been the fashion director and chief fashion critic for The Times since 2014.
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