Rhuigi’s debut for bally shaped by Filipino family and heritage
“This is going to be big for my family,” Rhuigi Villaseñor, the Fil-American creative director of Bally, said of his debut collection for the 171-year-old Swiss luxury house.
It’s actually huge for the fashion industry, too. Known for finely crafted leather shoes and bags, the brand had a hip phase in the 1980s when rappers like Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick wore its athletic footwear, minting Bally as one of the originally hyped designer sneakers. The last creative director in 2017 was Pablo Coppola, who updated designs, but it took five years before the house felt they found the right person to turn the brand around when Rhuigi came into the picture.
Rhuigi had established his own brand, Rhude, in 2015 in Los Angeles, where his family had moved to from the Philippines when the designer was 11. As struggling immigrants who shared a one-room apartment, he knew he had to work early on, so he embarked on a bandana T-shirt project that caught the eye of rapper Kendrick Lamar, placing him in the fashion mainstream and jumpstarting his business to become a significant player in the US and eventually have a Paris show that caught the attention of the European market.
Although he started with cult streetwear that mixed hip-hop and high fashion, his sensibility is informed by the luxury and glamour that inspired him in his youth when he would covet the suits he saw in GQ and the aristocratic lifestyle of Town & Country.
It’s the Filipino appreciation of fine things and quality goods — just look at those queues at Louis Vuitton and Dior at Greenbelt 3 — that came naturally and served him well. With guidance from his mother’s tailoring skills, he created the Rhude style using a vernacular based on what “I would buy if I had money when I didn’t have any money.” He created only the most covetable objects of desire one just couldn’t live without.
When he did finally have the money, he only acquired the finest, from vintage cars and watches to Hermès bags that always accompany him on private jets and yachts. He never forgot his roots, however, with the Filipino way and his family always an influence on his work and the reason why he was working so hard in the first place. His father, Rhoderick, always reminded him of the need to “make sacrifices since we’re not that rich, so we have to be really smart and focused and to always remain humble.”
Now that he can, Rhuigi rewards his parents for all their hardships by indulging them — a gold Rolex was given as a gift to Papa from his first big check and he satisfies Mama’s bag cravings with visits to Chanel.
Rhuigi’s style, which is Americana seen through the eyes of a Filipino immigrant, makes his perspective so unique that it was the reason he was chosen for Bally. Many questioned why a heritage brand would hire an independent LA startup designer, but Bally CEO Nicolas Girotto, who already started shaking up the company with e-commerce and sustainability commitments, felt Rhuigi was the perfect disruptor with the right balance of “contemporary streetwear and a luxury sensibility” to bring the brand in a new direction: “He’s someone who has a direct dialogue with his audience and through this dialogue, gets a good sense of where society is going.”
Just like Rhude, Bally started as the family enterprise of Carl Franz Bally and his brother Fritz from the basement of their family home. This made the job even more personal and compelling for Rhuigi, as he delved into the archives and interrogated Bally’s artisans about their craft to devise new ways to interpret the visual codes of the house. His discovery of a ’30s-era logo, for one, was one of the logos used in the restyling, aside from transforming the house from a leather goods company to a serious apparel and accessories purveyor, particularly of womenswear.
“It’s about creating a woman that’s celebrated,” says the designer. “That’s effortlessly sexy. To truly 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.”
True enough, when he presented the first Bally collection for SS2023 during the recent Milan Fashion Week, there was a palpable energy in the air among the overcapacity crowd at the Fabbrica del Vapore. With a collection titled “Ecdysis,” or a shedding of outer skin, it was indeed a rebirth for the house with elevated yet easy-to-wear pieces that mixed tailored refinement with sport-inspired details for a sophisticated look.
Slouched, washed denim was paired with a skirt hand-embroidered in black baguette beads. Jeans were worn with jackets in pink suede or citrus snakeskin. There’s playfulness in the elegance, like plush silk velvet pantsuits with tiger prints for ladies and the same pants with a black silk button-down for men, who wore them with python babouches. Men in double-breasted suits in monochrome were not too serious, thanks to the Mary Janes on their feet.
Silk dresses with sensuous silhouettes and metallic motorcycle jackets with safari pockets worn with matching knee-high boots updated the early works of Yves Saint Laurent for the modern woman. A black knit turtleneck dress had the backless drama of a built-in thong cutout at the back, recalling Guy Laroche’s piece for French film star Mireille Darc in 1972.
There’s a relaxed vibe that belies the masterful craftsmanship and premium materials the house is known for — a sunny resort feeling with a ’70s Studio 54 and Hollywood twist that the designer brings from his adopted city in California, as well as his childhood growing up in Manila. Bracelets and earrings on the models, in fact, were inspired by “Earthquake Baroque” churches of the Philippines, says Rhuigi: “It would be a pity if I didn’t amplify my own heritage at a house like this. I want to speak about my personal stories and heritage along with the brand’s heritage.”
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