A designer’s designer, Haider Ackermann has long been seen as a favourite for top jobs at major brands. Photo: Tom Ford
Tom Ford, a brand long associated with the sexy, glamorous aesthetic of its eponymous founder, has a new creative director: Haider Ackermann, a designer known for his superb tailoring skills and mastery of varied materials.
Ackermann assumed the company’s creative mantle Tuesday (Sept 3), just weeks after Peter Hawkings, a right-hand man of 25 years to designer Tom Ford, left the company in July.
Hawkings, the first outsider to oversee design at Tom Ford, took the creative director job in 2023, not long after Ford sold his stake in his brand to Estee Lauder and the Ermenegildo Zegna Group in a US$2.8bil (RM12.1bil) deal.
If there is justice in fashion (and there seldom is) then Ackermann’s appointment is something of a vindication.
A designer’s designer, he has long been seen as a favourite for top jobs at major brands and was often said to have been Karl Lagerfeld’s choice as his successor at Chanel.
Lagerfeld ultimately anointed Virginie Viard, who in June announced she was leaving Chanel after five years as its artistic director.
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Ackermann started his namesake label with a womenswear collection in the early 2000s before expanding into menswear. He recently designed a couture collection for Jean-Paul Gaultier and, from 2016-18, was the creative director at Berluti, where he introduced womenswear to what had previously been a menswear brand.
Seemingly, it was Ackermann’s finely crafted, beautifully proportioned and chromatically assured Berluti collections that brought him to the attention of Ford.
“I find both his womenswear and menswear equally compelling,” he said in a news release.
Ackermann, who is in his early 50s, exited Berluti just as he seemed to be hitting stride. GQ wrote that his collections for the storied French label “established a convincing new sartorial identity for the contemporary professional male of limitless financial means”.
There is reason, then, for optimism about his new endeavour.
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Ackermann, a French national with an international background (he was born in Bogota, Colombia, and grew up in Ethiopia, Chad, Algeria, the Netherlands and Belgium, where he studied fashion at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp), comes to Tom Ford as the brand is grappling for a fresh identity.
He brings to it a proven ability to conjure coolly sensual images on the runway, ones that are respectful of though distinct from those of Ford, the brash Texan designer most celebrated for bringing sexy back.
“Haider Ackermann and Tom Ford both possess incredible rigour when it comes to tailoring, add to which Haider’s spectacular use of colour,” Gro Curtis, the editorial director of V and VMan magazines said in a text message.
“His vision for men at Berluti was always sensual and sharp,” Curtis added. “He was sexy in a most poetic way that aligns with the Ford legacy.” – The New York Times
