READY FOR TAKEOFF?: Jil Sander‘s creative director Simone Bellotti has delivered one of the more enigmatic campaigns for fall — shot outdoors like so many this season, but also referring to interiors, a theme that ran through his fall collection.
Model Edie Campbell gives off Hitchcockian heroine vibes as she wanders an airfield incongruously furnished with a gleaming black desk, a long bench and a plush armchair draped in latex. Daisuke Ueda models the menswear.
“We found this almost-forgotten airfield near the Alps and knew immediately: it’s neither arrival nor departure, just a place suspended between the two” is how Bellotti described the “in-between” atmosphere of the campaign, shot by photographer and videographer Moni Haworth.
“We didn’t want furniture, we wanted the memory of furniture — a sofa half-wrapped, a table you can’t quite use, a mirror that doesn’t reflect,” he added, describing “objects from our homes, oddly displaced on the tarmac, stripped of their function.”
Adding to the vaguely impassive, disquieting mood is the cold light — echoing his fluorescent-lit runway venue last February.
“Moni shoots everything on analog film,” Bellotti explained. “It forces a kind of trust: You commit to a moment without knowing exactly what you’ve captured. That uncertainty is in the texture of the images.”
According to the Milan-based fashion house, the plot is “deliberately abstract — an invite for the viewers to fill the gaps however they prefer.…Are they living on the runway? Are they ready to depart or just landed?”
Fall 2026 was the Italian designer’s sophomore show for Jil Sander, and he explored a “homelier brand of minimalism, selectively imperfect, sometimes awkward and occasionally irrational, but that’s what excited the eye and got the fashion juices flowing,” WWD opined about the show.
