Nicolas Girotto—the new-ish, internally promoted CEO at Bally—talks a good talk. At this presentation, held in a stylized imagining of a Swiss house, he mentioned an excellent Bally initiative this year to remove around a ton of rubbish from the upper reaches of Mount Everest. He added that the company is working hard to pivot its operations to ensure they are, from base to peak, environmentally irreproachable, but conceded that it is a work in progress.
That there were only 10 looks for each gender presented here was also to infer a leaner, more resource-conscious outlook from this venerable brand. Yet Girotto admitted that, of course, much more was on offer behind the scenes. And when I visited Bally in June, the then-commercial-facing showroom was packed to the rafters with much, much more menswear merchandise than was on display this week.
Many of Milan’s most successful fashion executives live just across the Swiss border in Lugano. This is apparently solely for tax reasons, but if Bally’s vision of a typical Swiss house is accurate, perhaps there’s more to it. Models lolled around on sofas, mattresses, or even reclined on banks of mussed grass in an appealingly textured clapboard structure (which reps assured was all to be recycled and reused). For women stand-out garments included a long black dress in irregular, diagonally pitched panels of silk and lace, whose slant reflected the line of the kitten heel worn with it, as well as some typically sharp suiting. (Bally is really excellent at this.) For men there was a lovely zippered compartment jacket in ombré-textured orange leather, an Alpine-print double-faced shirt, and some substantial double-faced khaki pants. There were also pieces of leather shirting and trousers, which seemed unlikely ever to ascend into the retail arena.
