The mirrors that lined the walls of Haider Ackermann’s show venue on Wednesday night were subtly graffiti-ed with suggestions of deviance: it was easy to imagine provocative phrases, obscene drawings, phone numbers, hand prints… the sort of improvised decor you might find in a gamy club privé. This Versailles of Vice was inspired by a much younger Ackermann’s work experience in a nightclub in Antwerp’s red light district. Come dawn, the working girls would meet up to review the night’s adventures. The stories he heard stayed with him. Occasionally, he would check out the little mirrored cabins where they plied their trade. “To get back that feeling, I wanted to have a sense that you’re in a club,” Ackermann said in a preview earlier this week. “And you can go into a secret room where everything happens.”
To subtly infuse the atmosphere with salacious suggestion was the least Haider could do to honour the spirit of the man whose house he now heads up. Tom Ford, who sold his brand to Estée Lauder in 2022 and exited the company the following year, was fashion’s favourite satyr from the moment his seismic sexquakes shook Gucci to its core in the mid-90s. Ackermann has also offered powerfully erotic visions over the course of his quarter-century career. In their personal style as well, both men embodied a dandy libertinism, so the announcement last September that Ackermann would assume Ford’s mantle — replacing Peter Hawkings, who lasted less than a year in the role — stood out as a deliciously dangerous liaison amid fashion’s current flurry of brand-designer resets. It was definitely much less of a surprise than Ackermann’s creative directorship of Canada Goose, which he continues to do alongside Tom Ford.
You can only wonder at the interplay. Once upon a time, Ackerman would have been burning the midnight oil in a mad sybaritic whirl. Now you’re as likely to find him camping on a glacier in Iceland. “In my world, there’s so much ego, mine included, but being in nature makes you feel very small,” he mused. “It calms me right down. It’s the balance, the quietness, the intimacy I need. At Tom Ford, I embrace a different kind of beauty. One challenges the other. One helps the other also.”
Ackermann laughed as he claimed that, between the two, he’d learned that he can really work hard. “But I also learned that I still have a long way to go, and every day is a new exercise. Whether it’s Tom Ford or Canada Goose or Jean Paul Gaultier couture, every time it’s like the first love. You just try to spend as much time as possible with the person, and you don’t feel that you’re tired and exhausted, and you just go for it without thinking. This is how I feel.”
Casting his new role at Tom Ford as an affair fits with the brand’s sexualised heritage. “How can it not be an affair when Mr. Ford calls you with that voice?” Ackermann mock-marvelled. “It feels so intimate when you get that phone call. Mr. Ford is all about seduction and desire. Maybe there’s a part of me that belongs to that world as well, but now perhaps I will express it more because it allows me a freedom that I might not have had in the past. I felt restrained. Perhaps that was due to my Catholic upbringing. I’m more shy about it. But now, listening to Mr. Ford, you feel like, ok, just express this sensuality or this sexuality or this eroticism or whatever. Feel free.”
“The strange thing with Mr Ford and me is that even though we’re so absolutely different as people, we have so many of the same references,” Ackermann continued. “We admire the same people: Halston, Saint Laurent.” The show space was dressed as Ford dressed his show spaces, banquettes, bolsters and deep pile carpet with a kind of shadowy, lush minimalism bordering on brutalism, like the house Paul Rudolph designed for Halston in the seventies (which Ford now owns). Vodka martinis were served. So far, so Ford.
“It gives you a little bit of the decadence and eccentricity of the 70s,” Ackermann added, “which I am personally not about, but it’s a sign that there was this kind of freedom, which is related to luxury as well.” What he was hoping his audience would understand was that they were about to see a collection that was inspired by Tom Ford, the man, rather than Tom Ford, the designer.
“I can describe the Gucci woman to you,” he explained. “She’s very clear. Because Tom was Gucci and Gucci was Tom. But the Tom Ford woman is going to be harder to describe. I think she went through different stages in her life. There’s something quite disturbing about this, which is why I prefer to take references from my observation of Mr. Ford, of things that he said to me, or things I’ve noticed, like the architecture he likes, the material he likes. I haven’t taken pieces out of his collections. It’s not about the clothes, it’s about what I think belongs in his world. Also, it’s a way for me to not copy what he did, because that would be absolutely uninteresting. So it’s more about the selfishness of my own feelings about him. Hopefully it will reflect that it’s a good pas de deux between him and me.”
But Ackermann leads in this dance. Look at the Tuesday teaser he posted on Instagram: longtime muse Saskia De Brauw and photographer Ethan James Green posing naked in front of a mirror. Nudity, his own bared body included, was often a commercial gambit for Ford, an effortless way to raise a ruckus and spotlight the preening, performative essence of his image-making. “There’s a vanity to the house,” Ackermann agreed. “You see this image of Saskia and Ethan James Green, you know nothing about them. Are they friends, lovers, brother and sister? But you understand the vanity of them looking at themselves through the eye of the mirror, which is even more intense. I wanted this tension. I think that’s what the world of Tom Ford is about.” And yet, Ackermann’s nudes are quiet, composed, pure, where Ford’s often suggested transgression and decadence. “We’re living in a world where everybody’s screaming and loud, and I feel like perhaps my man and woman are most silent, but it doesn’t mean that they are not there. Perhaps their silence is a force. But you don’t have to scream it.”
Quietly forceful was actually a pretty good description for the clothes Ackermann showed. They certainly didn’t scream. They were too precise and interior for that. He said they were lined in cashmere, like luxurious cocoons. He considered that a “selfish” gesture, fitting for his idea of luxury. But then he’s always been the most gestural of designers, a past master at creating an attitude on the catwalk. Here, the vampish red lips and sculpted hair created an eerie android perfection. (Am I alone in seeing a hint of the “Valley of the Dolls” shoot Ford did with Steven Klein for W magazine in 2005, the one where he is buffing the bare bum of a blond himbo with a polisher?)
Ackermann’s soundtracks have always been his best friends. In keeping with his morning-after mirrors, the music was Jóhann Jóhansson’s “Good Night, Day,” majestic, melancholic. “My story goes that Mr. Ford was all about nightlife, I am what comes after. I wanted to start in calmness.”
Pure simplicity, too, I guess, with a monochrome opening, black leather jackets and pants, white silk t-shirts. One of Ackermann’s past signatures has been sombre jewel tones. He described the palette here as joyful. The colour was energising. A sky blue silk robe with velvet lapels courted the kind of quirk he wanted in his menswear. There were plenty of reminders of what a great colourist Ackermann is: a suit in acid yellow silk, a blazer in mint green, a combination of violet and dark chocolate. Lulu Tenney’s blue caftan, fully open down one side, felt like a nod to Ford. The designer’s favourite redhead Karen Elson was wearing Ackermann’s update of the fringed extravaganza she’d originally sported in the legendary “secret” show for Spring 2011 which marked Ford’s return to the catwalk after his post-Gucci sabbatical.
Of course, there were tuxedos. They were a Ford signature, but Le Smoking is also an Ackermann go-to. Le Smoking was transmogrified into stately gowns. But then there were the jacket and pant combinations, more undone than Ford’s, “more the morning after,” Ackermann said. A Haider tux for women featured a sharply cropped jacket, a louche low-slung pant (lowered crotch, longer zip), a dress shirt scissored into a cutaway. Another, for men, was more classically formal, with a waistcoat. “There’s always rigour, even for the morning after,” Ackermann added. “But then I try to deconstruct it, because that’s who I am.” You could say deconstructed formality has been his own wildly effective design signature in the past. He leaned into it here with a strong, sensual undercurrent.
Which is why one best in show was a sinuously swirling, floor-sweeping t-shirt dress in green silk. It was almost demure in its long-sleeved, turtlenecked frontage, but the surprising slash in the back was so deep it almost met the long slit on the skirt. (Another gorgeous Fordian echo — Edie Sedgwick in the green gown Rudi Gernreich designed for the opening night of Warhol’s first retrospective in 1965.) Surgical slashes were Ackermann’s way of opening up other pieces. He compared them to the canvases of Lucio Fontana. “I know that Mr. Ford owns a Fontana, and I’m, like, ‘Damn, this is what I would like to have.’ I dream of Fontana because I find it so clear. Razor cut, straight forward and yet so sensitive. Yeah, if I could make dresses and suits based on Fontana, that’s what I would love to do, because it’s just one sharp movement, one razor cut that makes you bleed.” (Speaking of formal, you’ll have noticed Ackermann referred to his predecessor throughout our conversation as “Mr. Ford,” never “Tom,” which seemed slightly arch to me. Haider can be very droll. Or maybe it was just his way of emphasising what a “Fantastic Man” Ford is.)
A handful of men’s suits looked straightforward enough, but as they moved, they sparkled with thousands of tiny sequins. Ackermann’s debut ended on a subdued note, with a few pieces dense with grey beading that suggested python skin: an evening dress, a draped jacket, a simple elongated tube of beads. “I didn’t want Le Smoking to be the end,” he said. “The whole space was grey: grey mirrors, grey velvet on the floor. So I wanted to finish in those tones.”
Once it might have been Leonard Cohen’s sonorous tones bringing the show home, but here, it was Nick Cave, whose “Into My Arms” fired up Ackermann’s latest emotional coup. “I’ve always wanted to play this song, but I never found the occasion for it. This felt like the right moment. There’s this one phrase, ‘I believe in love, and I know you do, too.’ And I took all the music away, so that you hear only his voice saying that.”
It was the sort of grace note that Tilda and Timothée and the Haiderites have come to expect from him. His blend of calme, luxe et volupté promises a vital new update for Tom Ford the brand. Tom Ford, the man, embraced an overwhelmed Ackermann onstage. Behind the scenes, Ford’s old business partner Domenico de Sole bestowed the ultimate blessing: “You’ve secured our legacy.”