TRUE COLOURS
Bally’s plain-speaking design director, whose approach is anything but basic, is bringing modern colour to the historic fashion stalwart.
Bally’ s plainspeaking design director Pablo Coppola is bringing modern colour to the historic fashion stalwart.
For the design director of a global luxury house, Pablo Coppola is being uncharacteristically frank. “It was getting a little bit stale,” the Argentinian says of the Swiss label Bally before his appointment in 2014. If a publicist were listening in to our phone conversation, one has the feeling they would be getting uneasy. When talk turns to himself, he is equally forthright. “It took a little bit of time,” he says of finding his rhythm in the role. “It was a lot of getting to know the company, too, how we work in the factory.”
It’s refreshing to hear him speak openly, particularly when you take into account that he is responsible for the next chapter in the house’s 165-year history. His debut autumn/winter ’14/’15 collection, rather than a dramatic aesthetic about-face, was a “palette cleanser”. “I said when we get comfortable we can start playing with prints, playing with this and that.” The mostly demure creams, sensible khaki and navy weren’t aimed to jolt show-goers but showcase elevated wardrobe staples and affirm that luxury was going to be at the heart of the designer’s tenure.
Fast-track to resort 2017 and fizzing yellows, shocking pink and brick-red accents bedeck a sensible core of wide-leg trousers, blazers and blouses. Coppola really lets loose with the rest of the collection: optical print minis, high-shine yellow outerwear and Kelly-green alpine jackets in Wes Anderson colourways. His mission is winningly simple. “I want to imagine somebody outside of us would [see a piece] and say: ‘Oh, that’s very Bally.’”
Then there’s leather. Coppola’s youthful experimentation blows away stuffy connotations of Bally as an expert in the material, part of his brief from CEO Frédéric de Narp. At his estimate, leather makes up roughly 60 to 75 per cent of each collection. While many millennials would be hard pushed to explain what it means to edge-paint and bond a jacket or render a leather coat feather-light, they might know, when techniques such as these are applied to, say, a bottle-green coat with a cream fur collar, that they’d want to buy them. The same goes for bleached jeans, chubby fur coats and lolly-wrapper metallic accessories that make up the rest of the collection.
Shoes, with which founder Carl Franz Bally first made a name for himself in 1851, are also top of mind. With around 35,000 pairs in the archives, Coppola delved in like “a kid in a candy store”. “You need to focus because you’re being pulled in every direction. Every time I go I see something I didn’t see before. There’s always something in a draw somewhere.”
Coppola’s design history – at Burberry, Tom Ford, Christian Dior and Alexander McQueen – is in accessories. Approaching clothes for the first time, he had the advantage of feeling removed. “[I thought of it like] speaking to the department next door to say: ‘That jacket is horrible’, or: ‘That’s beautiful.’” He also treats clothes with the painstaking attention required of crafting luxury bags and shoes. “I was looking at things that normally aren’t done; linings and contrast, piping details inside jackets.”
Another advantage that could easily go unnoticed is the way clothes are cut to reveal the accessories. “The length of the trousers has to be so you can see the shoe and then the shoe fits in the right place on the ankle.” At other houses, he says, accessories would be more of an afterthought. “It was a bit of a reverse in the balancing. The ready-to-wear becomes the accessories to the accessories.”
Coppola keeps tabs on contemporary culture by reading books, but mostly it’s the moving image that piques his interest. “Every time I go home, I watch one or two episodes of something I am hooked on.” Right now, that’s cult Netflix series Stranger Things.
That youthful vibrancy is reflected in a love of colour, an emerging Bally signature. As part of the design process, the team start with a colour card, “and then somehow or other, we end up with the same hyper-colour. I call it colour with vitamin; it is never faded, it is never pastel. If it is a purple it is really intense.”
As for his goals for the Swiss label, he shoots straight again. “For me it would be amazing if every time someone is looking for a shoe, they think of Bally.” Rather than a lofty or vague end game he puts forward that he would like to make “normal shoes” in different heel heights. He also wants people to fall in love with pieces, paying little mind to heritage and craftsmanship. “I like it when people make no sort of association with a brand.”
You can’t help but warm to such a lack of pretence. “I’d like to imagine Bally as a happy brand, where the prints make you smile,” he says. “I spent all my life working in other studios where sometimes the hem of a shirt was the most feared thing on the planet. I think we need to be more realistic. It doesn’t mean we don’t care; we do, but at the end of the day, [fashion is] commerce with an artistic inclination. A bit light-hearted; very happy, very colourful.” And if he stays the same path, very Bally.