On a cool spring morning in midtown Manhattan, Brian Atwood is sitting on a couch in the Bally showroom, sipping water and fondling a shoe. Distractingly handsome—Atwood’s first foray into fashion, after graduating from the Fashion Institute of Technology in the early Nineties, was as a runway model—the designer runs his hands over the rich brown leather of a peep-toe maryjane, the substantial heel of which is shaped like an ice pick. “It’s the Guniga,” Atwood, 41, says in his low, quiet voice and places the shoe on a table in front of us. Six thin straps cross the top of the stiletto, with a tiny silver buckle accenting each one. He leans back and smiles. “It’s very sexy, right?”
Sexy, of course, is the name of the game for Atwood: In his first year as Bally’s creative director, he has gone about revamping the 157-year-old brand and its approximately 250 stores from a staid source of loafers and suit jackets for business guys to the sort of label that someone like Sienna Miller might look to for, say, a pair of killer pumps and a breezy prairie dress. (Indeed, the actress visited the Beverly Hills store just a few days earlier and scooped up a shirt, Atwood says.) Glamour—a certain go-go, endless-naked-legs glamour—is what Atwood has cultivated in his shoe designs since he started his own line in 2001, and it’s this particular sex appeal that caught the eye of Bally CEO Marco Franchini while he was casting about for a revitalizer. “I liked [Atwood’s] style; his sophisticated shoes,” says Franchini, who in late April announced the acquisition of Bally by
Labelux, a Vienna-based company. “There have been major improvements in the collection already. He’s made it more desirable, more modern. I think we’ve been able to provide the customer with a clearer image of where the brand is going.”
“I actually wasn’t looking for something else, at all,” Atwood says of his collaboration with the company, which includes overseeing accessories, men’s wear and women’s wear. “But it had a great name; it was kind of untarnished, so for me it was like a blank canvas that you can really do something with, and that was very interesting.” He pauses and smiles. “And to be able to have control over everything, that was good too.”
Atwood set to work in early 2007 by visiting the place of Bally’s birth (and the site of its archives): a sleepy Swiss town named Schönenwerd where, in 1847, Carl Franz Bally took over the family ribbon-weaving business, which he expanded into a shoe line, selling everything from delicate pumps to boots for schussing around the local snow-covered slopes. “There is literally a room full of 13,000 pairs of shoes, from the 1800s; from the Fifties, the Sixties. You have to wear gloves in there, and as a shoe designer, it was like being a kid in a candy store,” says Atwood. “I had no idea they did these beautiful glamour shoes, with an archive that would rival Ferragamo’s. And that got my head going about the possibilities.”
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