Bally’s New Designer Knows “We All Just Wanna Feel Sexy”
Designer Rhuigi Villaseñor is a smooth talker. Even when he talks about how anxious he is for his debut show for the Swiss luxury brand Bally, which takes place Saturday afternoon in Milan, his voice is like the custard beneath the caramelized sugar of a crème brûlée: “I’m nervous,” he almost purrs, on a video call about a week before his show. “This is the main stage, you know. I better sing my ass off.”
The Los Angeleno designer, who is 30, started the brand Rhude in 2015, translating smooth talk imagery like the Marlboro ads and Coca-Cola logos into sumptuous leather loafers and sexy leather jackets. “Rhude was an exploration of what American consumerism is,” he says. Now, having uprooted much of his life to Switzerland since he was appointed to Bally in January of this year, “I'm really indulging myself in this lifestyle of Switzerland and Gstaad and Europe, and what it means to truly be luxurious in this sense.”
Oh yeah.
At Rhude, Villaseñor’s work unleashed a phenomenon among a cohort of young, fashion-rabid men, helping them come to a new understanding of what luxury means beyond logos and celebrity dressing. Instead, Rhude proposes, luxury can be a kind of communal connoisseurship.
“Community connoisseurship”—to be clear, that’s my phrase, not Villaseñor’s—might be a gussied up way of saying streetwear, which is a category into which Villaseñor is often lumped. Of course his remit goes beyond that, as his Bally debut declares: he is ready to conquer women’s wardrobes. “Menswear has gotten a bit crowded over the past, I would say, ten years,” he says. All the American designers, like Virgil Abloh, Mike Amiri, and Villaseñor, have taken Paris by storm. “What I'm doing with Bally, it’s not to take away from the men's business or my craftsmanship in menswear. It’s really more to follow this beautiful journey I'm learning about myself, and the craftsmanship and the heritage of Bally. I think the challenge here is really [to answer], what is the distinct new identity for Bally? And how can I create this new Bally woman?”
Even the women most devoted to fashion may be unfamiliar with Villaseñor. The fanatical nature of menswear over the past few years, with teenagers and twenty-somethings following designers like they’re bands or sports teams, is almost a sealed off universe from womenswear.
I’ve wondered for a long time whether a menswear designer might attempt to import some of that energy into women’s fashion. But that does not seem to be what Villaseñor has in mind. Bally presents a unique challenge: it’s not a major fashion player, and is, frankly, in need of a serious, sparkling, rethink. Consumers tend to interact with the brand most often through its duty-free shops in airports, where very little clothing is even sold. The sense that it is synonymous with a rigorous, contemporary definition of luxury is Villaseñor's to create.
The designer is taking a more sophisticated approach: “It’s about creating a woman that’s celebrated. That’s effortlessly sexy. I truly think to really sell luxury, women are the ones to take the lead on it. Womenswear has the bandwidth to create something fluid. Something that can reinvigorate the brand, you know?”
To scale this Matterhorn, Villaseñor has enlisted stylist George Cortina, whose taste is infamously fabulous if meticulous; he is known to drop mention of a single frame from an obscure Italian film as the reference for a photoshoot. “He’s a legend,” Villaseñor says. Cortina is on hand to style the show, which hints even more at the universe the designer is attempting to create. “I think he understands how to make a woman feel sexy in a simple white shirt,” says the designer of Cortina, adding that this is a skill of the stylist’s that he’s been studying for quite some time.
The word that Villaseñor uses a lot is one that’s fallen nearly into obscurity in women’s fashion: sexy.
“I think we all just wanna feel sexy,” he says. “As a designer, my duty is to log in our times, right? Like, where I think people’s minds are, where my consumers’ minds are, where the minds of the community I bring to the table are. With how I’m designing, and the people I’m surrounding myself with, I’m sort of absorbing this idea that we all just wanna feel celebrated and sexy, you know? Something liberating and refreshing, right?”
The debut will focus on classic sportswear, with fancy jewelry and cocktail dresses and Villaseñor’s first go at a handbag. He describes the clothes as “insane, beautifully crafted ready-to-wear pieces with sensual silhouettes.” He wants to move into swimwear, sunglasses, and other categories eventually, too. He figures if a person puts on five to seven items on a daily basis, he wants to “conquer” one to three pieces.
“I think it’s gonna be a celebrated, confident, beautiful human being,” he says of his new Bally woman. She sounds like a smooth operator.
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