Jil Sander Looks Better Weird
Jil Sander’s Fall/Winter 2026 campaign feels discovered. Like you’d stumble across it on some old $2 videotape at a secondhand shop. That’s partly by design: each static image is actually a grainy still from an even grainier short film, recorded by Moni Haworth on an abandoned airstrip somewhere near the Alps.
The result is an ad that feels more like the kind of fashion films David Lynch was making for Giorgio Armani and Yves Saint Laurent (or, actually, Jil Sander) in the 90s than anything you’d flick across on TikTok. It fits the far weirder chapter of Jil under Simone Bellotti, after eight years of Lucie and Luke Meier’s warmer, more romantic take on the brand.
Bellotti has already transformed Jil Sander into one of fashion’s most avant-garde, culturally literate labels within two seasons: His debut collection was preceded by a vinyl EP release by obscure electronic artist Bochum Welt, and his FW26 collection feels like not-of-this-era performance art.
It’s a welcome, but not entirely unexpected, metamorphosis. Bellotti knows his way around oddity. His brief (but critically lauded) tenure at the comparatively small Swiss leather brand Bally included collections inspired by decades-old Swiss subcultural figures — from drag artist Luciano Castelli to photographer Karlheinz Weinberger, who photographed bikers and rebels through the 50s and 60s.
These artistic inclinations, first glimpsed at Bally, have been given a far bigger platform. Yet Bellotti still maintains an interest in the more niche corners of culture, as seen in the FW26 campaign. Haworth is a master of harnessing this kind of fuzzy, surrealist atmosphere; her 2024 photo book 0081, made alongside longtime Miu Miu stylist Lotta Volkova, charts a Lynchian journey around Japan with artist Raiki Yamamoto.
After nearly a decade of the Meiers’ more grounded vision, bringing this kind of experimentality to a billion-dollar fashion brand is bold (and very, very Bellotti).
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