It’s summer in Italy, which means the trains are delayed and the air-conditioning is broken. I arrive in Milan from Rome, disheveled and an hour and a half late, to meet the creative director of Bally, Simone Bellotti, at the label’s atelier in Viale Piave. Despite being in the midst of preparing his next collection, Bellotti 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, he’s infused it with a contemporary streak informed by underground club scenes, teddy boys in mid-century England, and the work of the Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger, best known for his intimate photographs of rebellious working-class men, construction workers, bikers, and athletes. Bellotti kept the Swiss bells (a good luck charm in the national culture) but added studs, occasional furs, and the kind of edge that has transformed Bally into a brand that people are talking about. Perhaps even more remarkable: Bellotti has managed to do this not by orchestrating a social media tsunami, but with an organic ease that’s generated a rather old-fashioned word-of-mouth buzz.
For 16 years before turning his attention to Bally, Bellotti worked at Gucci, ultimately as the head of menswear and special projects (after earlier stints at Carol Christian Poell in Milan, Ferré, Bottega Veneta, and Dolce & Gabbana). It was at Gucci where he first cultivated his flaneur approach to creativity, working next to Alessandro Michele and living in the heart of Rome’s old Jewish ghetto. Meandering around the city’s center, he fell in love with Il Museo del Louvre in Via della Reginella––an antiques shop curated by the passionate Giuseppe Casetti, whom Bellotti grew instantly close to. At Casetti’s shop, which soon became a kind of second home, drawers and shelves overflowed with rare books, art catalogs, letters, drawings and paintings, and original prints and other work by Francesca Woodman, Luigi Veronesi, Ugo Mulas, and Mario Schifano—images that would change his life and career, particularly a collection of “mysterious, sepia-hued photographs of a group of women sprawled in nature,” as Bellotti describes them. “They seemed like hippies that predated the hippie movement—I was hypnotized by those women, with their hands on their foreheads and that incredible light filtering in.”
Casetti revealed to Bellotti that these were the first-ever images of the Monte Verità, a kind of early-20th-century proto-Esalen near the Swiss town of Ascona in the heart of canton Ticino, where thinkers and dreamers from all over the world (including Isadora Duncan, Carl Jung, and Hermann Hesse) sought alternative forms of living. Bellotti’s fiancée, Martina Zerneri, whom he met at Gucci when she worked in the brand image office, later gifted him the Ascona photos he fell in love with, which are now like talismans, inspiring—among much other work—the flower or honey-holding pouchettes Bellotti designed for Bally’s last two collections. “I wanted to add an element of irrationality and instinct, of utopia and freedom—not necessarily what we conjure when we think about Switzerland,” he says.
When he and Zerneri arrived in Milan in 2022, they lived in the very central area of Carrobbio—chosen because of both its abundant Roman ruins and its tourists. (“Chaos and antiquity,” Bellotti says: “It was the closest thing to Rome I could find in Milan.”) While Bellotti clearly misses the Eternal City’s sensorial splendors—“I was living at the Portico d’Ottavia and would wake up a few steps away from Teatro Marcello; sometimes the beauty felt daunting”—his life in Milan has maintained that dreamy, meandering romanticism. “Alessandro helped me find the right attitude,” he says, “a way to mix the old with the new without feeling overwhelmed by it.”
Sometimes, the moments of transcendence seemed to find Bellotti, rather than the other way around: That Milan apartment just happened to feature a renowned pianist as his and Zerneri’s downstairs neighbor, and Bellotti would return home from work and lie for hours on the floor listening to him play Chopin, overwhelmed by a deep sense of gratitude. “I love when beauty is so much that you can’t hold it in,” he says. “I feel so lucky.”
He was born about 20 miles north of Milan in the town of Giussano, in Brianza, an area known for its furniture. His father was in the upholstery business, and he grew up immersed in craftsmanship amid the smell of wood and textiles, which clearly left an impression: Ever since, Bellotti seems to need to touch with his hands and see with his eyes in order to create. This rather analog approach carries over to much of the rest of his life: He commutes by bicycle—even in the rain—collects vinyl records and film-based photography, and listens to his music through a vintage tube amplifier. (He is also very fond of his unbearably enchanting cats, whom he often finds propped in perfect meditation poses on the floor—backs straightened, with their upper paws folded onto their laps.)
As we walk around the room, the model, Federica Manzini, returns, in one of the most striking pieces from Bally’s winter collection—the mermaid skirt. “In researching ancient folktales, I discovered the story of the diavolezza —a mermaid who lived in the lakes near St. Moritz and moved around the mountains with a herd of deer,” Bellotti says. “When she realized the hunters were spying on her, she used her powers to make them lose their bearings. The great thing about these legends,” he continues, “is that they reveal how much we are all driven by instincts, which is also something I find necessary when trying to create new worlds.”
Instinct is also what brought Bellotti closer to music. He grew up with a passion for dance culture, and entrusted the soundtrack of his very first Bally show to the legendary DJ Leo Mas, whose 1980s sets at Ibiza’s Amnesia club put the island’s scene on the global map. “I wondered what a musical equivalent of Monte Verità might be—a place where people would feel free to dance in the sun,” Bellotti says. “The answer was Ibiza.”
If his creative vision is filled with contrasts rather than unity, that’s because it mirrors reality. “Utopia and disillusionment, minimalism and primitivism—the tension between opposing forces is where the juice of life is,” Bellotti says. (That, and keeping a curious mind: At the moment, he’s reading everything from Swiss novelist Fleur Jaeggy to Hermann Hesse, listening to Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Rachmaninoff, and Shostakovich, and studying the artwork of Beni Bischof.)
It’s dark outside now, but before leaving I tell Bellotti that I need to visit the famous wisteria terrace on the top floor of the Bally building. The two of us head upstairs and look out at the tropical garden below, which belongs to Milan’s famous Diana hotel. “My destiny is linked to this terrace,” Bellotti says, pointing to the building next door, which once housed the original Gucci offices. “Tom Ford’s office used to be right there, and Alessandro’s was in that same room for a brief period. This wisteria has seen so much!” A huge magnolia is spread out beneath us, lush in a way that’s rare for a Milanese garden. It seems that the things Bellotti loves—nature, beauty, surprise—follow him wherever he goes. “When you are in a state of openness toward the world, you can receive a lot from it,” he says. “The question is how to stay in that space.”
It’s getting late; the employees downstairs are probably about to head home—but with Bellotti, one feels that time is always relative.
