BALLY AUTUMN/WINTER 2015-16 READY-TO-WEAR MILAN FASHION WEEK
“I didn’t think I could do another beige trench,” Bally’s creative director, Pablo Coppola, said, explaining the abundance of color in his new Fall collection. When he arrived at the Swiss brand just over a year ago, Coppola set a course for the classics. It was a smart move—before he got there, the 150-year-old company didn’t have much of an identity despite attempts to revive it. Timelessness is a reliable route to timeliness these days. Turns out, though, that it was the bolder pieces that customers were responding to. “You do a camel cashmere sweater and nobody says anything, but do it in fuchsia and they all want it,” Coppola explained.
Hence the double-face cashmere coat in—yep—fuchsia, a double-breasted blazer with deep fur bands above the wrists, and a mac-yellow ostrich-skin coat. All of it came in more staid shades or sans fur on the other side of the showroom, but Coppola was pushing the brights, and they were the ones that registered, alongside a Margot Tenenbaum brown mink coat. Like Felipe Oliveira Baptista at Lacoste, Coppola was looking at the Wes Anderson 2001 movie this season. Makes you wonder if we’ll see a rush of Grand Budapest Hotel collections for Fall 2028.