It has been two years since Michael Herz and Graeme Fidler took charge of the creative process at Bally, the Swiss brand that has exploded its reach beyond shoes and bags in the last decade to become one of fashion’s bold-face names. Daniel Jeffreys met the ying-yang duo at the presentation of their men’s collection for Spring/Summer 2013.
The Forester Urban Expedition boot
It was a sweltering hot day in Milan last June when Michael Herz, one half of the dynamic design duo at Bally, began to impersonate a whirling dervish. Taking a white blouse from a hanger, the better to illustrate his creative process (“it’s about everything,” he says) he began to spin, trailing the filigree thin white silk about our heads like a kite.
The effect made the small, stuffy room next to the main chamber of a Corso Venezia palazzo seem suddenly Spring like. “You can keep doing that,” said Graeme Fidler, the taller and more down to earth other half of Bally’s design duet, who would be more likely to run naked across London Bridge than take up a shirt and begin to pirouette. “Maybe we should start a kite line.” The word ‘kite’ is pronounced like ‘kart’ in Fidler’s distinctive Geordie accent, and that’s another way in which he and Herz differ.
His diminutive sparring partner grew up in South America, while Fidler has the grit of England’s dour north east about him. “My mother loved movies and so did my brother,” says Herz. “I spent my childhood watching Jackie Chan and Abbot & Costello, my brother loved Jackie, and my mother was the Abbot and Costello fan.” In the case of Bud Abbot and Lou Costello, it was Abbot who played the straight man, just as Fidler does at Bally, although Herz is no dimwit. If Costello had Herz’s brains he would have had no trouble remembering who was on first in One Night in the Tropics, but then Abbot and Costello would not have become famous.
“I love those old movies,” says Herz, who is in charge of Bally’s women’s collection, while Fidler runs the men’s side. “But I have many inspirations. I will go from East Enders to Gothic Girl to Birdy. My favourite book is the Golden Youth of Lee Prince by Aubrey Goodman, because nobody has ever heard of it (the book is a less successful version of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye). If you carry a story in your mind it must be because your are in love with it.” Herz confesses that his recent passion is 50 Shades of Grey, the erotic bestseller penned by E.L. James.
“I am so in love with it, it’s not mommy porn, forget the sex, it’s so romantic that’s what is so beautiful about it,” he expostulates. “It’s a tale of a woman who can’t resist a man, even if she knows he’s bad, and her love transforms him. I am a fan of engagement. I guess you can see that.” Herz was referring to the highly visual realization of his and Fidler’s vision for Bally’s Spring Summer 2013 collection, which is set out in the adjoining palazzo chamber as a tableau vivant. At the centre of the diorama is a handsome man clad in Bally clothes and shoes with a Bally bag at hand – but that’s not all. The sylvan setting (imagine a small plateau in an Alpine valley – indeed something quite like the hills around Caslano, Bally’s home in Italian-speaking Switzerland) also has a beautifully hand made bicycle, an Alpa camera, an old turntable record player with records and a svelte young woman who lie’s cradled in the man’s arm as he reads Huckleberry Finn or poetry into her receptive ear.
“We have more of his world than just the shoes and the bags,” says Fidler. “We created an environment where we surrounded him with things,” chimed in Herz. “All the items say something about the kind of guy Bally man has become. It’s a sophisticated vision.” And what was the inspiration for the tableau? “As a designer you have 50 million things going through your head,” says Herz, who in his frenetic case has probably underestimated the number of thoughts that ping off his synapses. “When somebody says ‘what inspires you?’ I think something like ‘I can’t possible tell you, because actually I had the best sex in my life last night and that inspired me, along with shoes I found in the archive along with the film I just saw.’
What I do know is you can’t sit in a white room with a sheet of paper and wait for inspiration to come, because it won’t.” Herz and Fidler met at Aquascutum nine years ago as head of womenswear and menswear respectively. Their first collection for Bally in 2010 had to be assembled with barely a second for thought but it won good reviews, a tribute to how closely their visions are in sync, despite the sharp differences in their personalities. “Having worked together for so long, we understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses,” says Fidler. “We each know the way we each need to be pushed and challenged to create the perfect pieces for Bally.
Michael Herz (left) and Graem45 Fidler at their Spring Summer 2013 men’s wear presentation
Our roles are multi-faceted and clearly defined but obviously the synergy between the men’s and women’s collection is very important, so it’s important that we value each other’s opinion.” The 2012 and 2013 collections produced by Herz and Fidler have won positive reviews from the fashion world. Editors talk of the “freshness” that the two have brought to the venerable Swiss brand (founded in 1851) and their most recent offering during the Spring Summer 2013 women’s ready to wear fashion week in Milan took mesh and used it to create a woven bag, designed to make visible the bright orange silk shoe bag inside. They also presented dramatic woven neck pieces that were somewhere between tribal totem and original jewellery.
Although the duo is seeking a new direction for Bally, they have found much of the route map for the exploration in the company’s famous archives. “The Bally archive is mythical,” says Fidler. “On our first trip, we found a shoe with a very contemporary feel, slightly subversive and wonderful. But we were stunned to find that it was in fact [made] by Bally in 1939. It incorporated elastic, which took us back to when Carl Franz Bally began making shoes in his elastic factory. Using this as inspiration, we produced a modern variation on a heel that was very sculptural.
We also found a heel that combined metal-brushed gold and pear-tree wood. We used that in shoe heels, and for accessories as a lock.” Reaching their current positions at Bally might be regarded as a pinnacle for the two designers, but a great deal is riding on their shoulders, and each is aware of the pressure from a Swiss headquarters that has a sharp eye on the bottom line. “There is a lot of analysis about what the market wants and what people are buying and or not buying,” says Herz. “I keep it a little bit at arms length, so I can do my job, which is to let my mind go free. It is one of the most beautiful jobs in the world.”
A lovely metaphysical thought, but Fidler has more of the Northern coal miner about him, a capacity to make blunt assessments about economic realities. “We did a lot of trials at the start and what we want is still evolving,” he says. “You have to make a decision and arrive at something. Bally has been a good laboratory although they got worried and concerned that we had changed too much.” Herz jumps in at this point and the temperature in the steaming room gets a little hotter as he denies head office interfered in their process. The two looked at each other and changed the subject, as if they had agreed to differ on this aspect of their relationship, something they seem capable of doing with gracious ease. “We are very different people, we are not a couple,” says Herz. “He has a wife and a family and a two children, when it’s a couple it gets very complicated. There is independence and a dependence.
When we get back to London from Milan we may not even say goodbye to each other after we get off the plane, because we don’t need to. And we still make discoveries. I have always liked football; it just took him a long time to find that out. And he has dreadful taste in music. Like old people things.” Old is not the word that springs to mind when looking at the latest menswear collection from Bally. It’s original with enchanting heritage touches. It’s what you would expect two technically and creatively gifted people to produce if they were on the same wavelength. If the company’s owners can be patient with Herz and Fidler they may soon have an answer for Abbot and Costello’s most famous question, and the name on first will be Bally.
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