It started with a call. “I was in a meeting, and my phone was ringing, and I saw it was Tom Ford,” says Haider Ackermann. “My heart was beating, and I couldn’t wait to get out of the meeting to listen to that tremendously attractive voice of his, because that’s what he has. It’s so strange: The minute you see his name, you have so many flashbacks—the design, the sensuality, the movies—[but] I knew what it was about.”
Ackermann is relating this while sitting in a black chair in a white office at the Tom Ford headquarters in London. If everything here is monochromatic, the world for Ackermann has quite recently exploded into colour. What the call was about was Ford asking the 53-year-old Colombian-born French designer to become creative director of the house Ford founded in 2005. “It wasn’t much of a surprise,” Ackermann says. “He wrote me a long, beautiful letter to congratulate me when I was at Berluti, so I knew he liked my work. All the same, I was nervous. You can go through a lot of emotions in one minute.”
In March, Ackermann will debut his vision of Tom Ford with a coed show in—a first for the house—Paris. (Ackermann lives there, and the plan is to have the brand reside there, too—plus, he says, “there’s a kind of cinematography to the city.”) Only then will we finally see the results of that conversation between him and Ford. “It’s all about seduction, desire, provoking something,” he says. “More than talking about fabrics or colours, that’s what he and I both search for.”
At a first glance, it might not seem like the two have so very much in common, but they do, not least an approach to tailoring—and to eveningwear—that inhabits a world of spectacle and sensuality. Ackermann, like Ford, is one of fashion’s dramatists, deftly wielding strong shoulders, sinuous draping, and an audacious use of rich colour in both his women’s and men’s work, an approach that garnered him the adoration of the likes…
