Alexandra Palla built PALLA Vienna from a single dress and a TV appearance. The logic behind it — as with everything she does — was always there. She just had to follow it.
Alexandra Palla has never been just one thing, and she stopped apologising for that a long time ago. She comes from two entrepreneurial families — one side, a Viennese ham-making dynasty; the other, a textile business — and describes the combination not as coincidence but as genetics. "Both worlds are literally united in me," she says. The food. The fabric. The instinct for how things look, feel, and are made.
Today she runs PALLA Vienna, a fashion and lifestyle brand built around a signature check fabric she had woven to her specifications, in the red-and-white that is simultaneously a nod to Austria and a personal signature. She also has a cutting board she designed with two Viennese designers, a cookbook, a ceramics line, a food blog award she founded, a hotel room in the Salzkammergut she is about to design, and a Home Collection launching before summer. The range is wide. The thread connecting all of it — she uses this phrase herself — is unmistakable.
Two Grandmothers
She talks about her grandmothers the way some people talk about their greatest professional mentors. The first ran the wholesale operation for the family ham business, driving through Vienna in a VW van with her chauffeur and staff from four in the morning, managing a network of large restaurant clients with what Alexandra describes as total self-possession. The second studied medicine in the 1920s — at a time, she notes, when women finishing secondary school at all was unusual — and later worked for Hanro, the Swiss lingerie brand that became internationally known when Nicole Kidman wore one of their pieces on screen.
"Both were very self-confident, very strong women," she says. "And they gave me this understanding — this sense of self-evidence — that I could also be an entrepreneur. In many male-dominated industries, it is possible to be an independent businesswoman and have this confidence." Her mother, she adds, is also a formidable businesswoman. It is, she says, very much a generational inheritance.
The Dress That Started Everything
© Martina Berger
The story of PALLA Vienna begins, appropriately enough, with an appearance on Austrian television. Invited to appear on an ORF cooking programme, Alexandra found herself thinking seriously about what she'd wear. She had trained as a textile technician — a fact she had, by her own admission, largely ignored for years. But the question of the outfit brought it all back.
She remembered a weaving mill she'd visited. She ordered fabric samples. She knew immediately: a wrap dress, in the kitchen check fabric she'd chosen, in red and blue. The form came from her grandmother Berta, who had always worn wrap dresses as her working uniform when representing the family business. "I needed a wrap dress like my grandmother's," she says. The first prototype was made with a tailor nearby. She was happy with it immediately and ordered a few more — partly because she wasn't sure what else she might need them for.
She hung them in the window of her office on Schottentor (Vienna). They sold immediately. Then the ORF switchboard started ringing. "Who is that? What was she wearing? We want that dress." From there, the question became inevitable: how does this become a brand?
She already had more infrastructure than she realised. A food blog. An online shop where she'd sold her cutting board. International contacts from trade fairs. A presence in the Museum of Applied Arts. "I hadn't come from zero," she says. "The structure was there. But it was the birth of PALLA Vienna as a brand."
ROUGHCUTBOARD © Palla Vienna
The logo and CI came quickly too i cooperation with a Viennese graphic designer whom she'd been working with on a rebranding for her cousin's ham business. The result: the red-and-white concentric circle that she now has woven into every garment, which reads simultaneously as a target, as the Austrian flag, and as what she calls "community thinking — concentric circles, everything flowing into one another."
On Building Things — All Kinds of Things
PALLA Vienna is not Alexandra Palla's first company. It is not her second, or her third. She has founded a kindergarten — because the existing options didn't meet her standards — a food blog award (AFBA), media companies, networks, associations. She was part of the founding team of the news publisher News Verlag. Each time, she says, the same pattern: a clear vision, the courage to think at scale, and the discipline to build the right team around it.
"Think as big as possible. Have a large vision. Find people who are willing to think in those dimensions." A good jury, real expertise, institutional support — she applied this logic to a food blog award the same way she applied it to a fashion brand. "Be brave, don't lose sight of the goal. There will always be setbacks. But always make sure you build good teams around you."
She is also clear-eyed about failure and adaptation. "You have to give yourself the freedom to be open to alternatives, to adjust. You don't have to abandon your goals — but always keep that openness. And always, always take feedback."
On whether you need a formal design education to work in design: intensive engagement with the material is necessary, she believes, but an academic degree is not a prerequisite. What is required is real mastery of something — and knowing how to find the right people to fill every gap you have. "In one area, you must be good. Not a logistics expert, not a lawyer — but good enough in your own field to evaluate whether your logistics partner or your lawyer is the right one."
The Red Thread, Described
Ask her to describe the thread running through all her projects and she pauses, then answers honestly: "You don't know at twenty where the red thread leads. It's a journey you start in your life and you can be grateful if you have one at all — like a lifeline, something you can hold onto." In retrospect, she can see it clearly. Looking forward, she says she's certain the journey continues — she just doesn't know yet where it goes.
What she can say: every project has come from her, from her own person, her own phase of life. When her children were small, she cooked obsessively and wanted to write the recipes down. The food blog followed. The blog led to a network. The network led to an award. The award led to a community. And somewhere in there, the attention to how she showed up — what she wore, how she presented herself — led to a dress, which led to a brand.
"You yourself are also a kind of company," she says. "There is a culture that you carry within you."
Home, in Colour
Her home begins — she says this without hesitation — with a large, practical wardrobe near the entrance. Many coat hooks. No chaos at the door. "When you come home, you should be able to step into a space and let it work on you — not have to fight your way through disorder."
© Alexandra Palla
Beyond that: light. She has a large open kitchen with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the garden, and she is emphatic that this came first — the food videos happened later, because the light was already so beautiful.
And colour. Behind her during the interview is a deep red wall — Atomic Red, from a British paint company she admires for its pigment quality. "At every different light it reflects differently," she says. She has a habit of painting individual walls in strong colours, changing them every year or two as she needs to. During the years of Zoom calls, she noticed how bare and colourless other people's backgrounds were, and thought: I want that Vienna red here.
What makes a room feel like hers, she says, is character — a personal handwriting. Old pieces from her family combined with new textile details, checked tablecloths, things that have meaning. "Like an unmistakeable look that you carry when you go out — what is your unmistakeable look at home?" She adds, with the quiet certainty of someone who has spent a long time thinking about this: "When you see me, you can immediately imagine how I live. It is all one."
Her number one piece of advice, when asked, is simple. She acknowledges it sounds generic but she means it anyway: Believe in yourself.
Alexandra Palla is the founder of PALLA Vienna, a Vienna-based fashion and lifestyle brand. She is a textile technician by training, a food blogger, cookbook author, and serial entrepreneur. This conversation was part of the HOMEISSUE Podcast, hosted by Alena Gröfler.
Listen to this episode in German
Cover Foto © Martina Berger