The Bally showroom, where we used to watch Frida Giannini’s Gucci, was piled high today with old stereos and cameras laminated in matte peach-color plastic. Around them were clothing rails mostly filled with peach workwear jackets and oxford shirts. This was meant as a nod to the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena, California, where the Bally collective—as the design team self-styles itself—traveled for what sounds like a pretty sweet deal of a research trip this season. The peachiness was to reference a Californian sunset.
Among all that peachiness was scattered the new season’s Bally merch, like treasures waiting to be snapped up amongst the bric-a-brac. Shoes included a tennis sneaker reissued from the 1990s; a chisel-toe zippered women’s boot with a scored gold leather heel; the Grip (a new woven leather and elastic-upper sneaker); and toweling-upper logo slides.
Bags included the Cecyle (christened after Carl Franz Bally’s wife), a semicircular design with resin fastenings—also featured on fabric-upper sandals. The Janelle was a diamond-quilted rectangular boxlet of a bag with a square clasp and a rotating lock detail. There was also a suite of bags and shoes in an irregular stripe drawn from the Bally archive.
Womenswear included a shearling teddy coat; some red laminated cotton shorts and a same-fabric hoodie with a vintage catalog price list–page emblem on its chest; a paper-thin glossed-leather hooded trench in a zingy green and a red (also available, adapted, for men); a thick terry minidress; viscose fine-gauge knits in upholstery brown; and a supercute green striped terry polo and shorts. Men’s included densely knit polos; a bold cow-caramel horsehair tracksuit with Bally-logo-edelweiss-flower piping (Alpine streetwear); a low-armed green knit vest; and a new line of eyewear manufactured by Marcolin.
