It’s summer in Italy, which means the trains are delayed and the air-conditioning is broken. I arrive in Milan from Rome, dishevelled and an hour and a half late, to meet the creative director of Bally, Simone Bellotti, at the label’s atelier in Viale Piave, but Bellotti—despite being in the midst of preparing his next collection—greets me with a humble, calm aura. As we walk through the showroom, a wunderkammer filled with Alpine cultural references and beautiful objects, accessories, and clothes, an elegant model appears and disappears wearing different looks, making me wish I were 20 years younger so I could be brave enough for these sexy Swiss culottes, high-stringed leather boots, and studded handbags.
Since becoming Bally’s creative director in May 2023, Bellotti, 45, has been combining the romance of Swiss folktales with punk rebellion and a kind of alternative-intellectual-banker cool. An early experience in the Bally archives in Schönenwerd, Switzerland, was formative: “I was blown away,” Bellotti tells me. “I found negatives, photos from the 1950s, printed menus from dinner events in beautiful neoclassical fonts.
Every single shoe in the archive—from Victorian slippers to old hiking shoes to snow boots—had its own glass case, with some samples dating as far back as the ninth century. I found ancient Egyptian sandals, Eskimo shoes, fragments of statues from the Roman Empire.” While Bellotti has maintained the brand’s reverence for antiquity,.