Haider Ackermann’s Hot-Blooded Tom Ford Debut Seduces Paris

Then there’s the fact that Ford, protective of his legacy, personally tapped Ackermann for the job last September. His immediate successor, Peter Hawkings, fell out of favor with Ford and was gone after only a year. Ackermann’s delicate dance is to maintain Tom Ford’s status as the place to go when you want to look your most glamorous while teaching the brand some new moves.

It turns out that Ackermann has learned a few new moves himself. At his own brand the designer developed a sort of swashbuckling signature by tailoring louche fabrics in bone-tight fits—just see Chalamet’s razor-sharp red carpet silhouette. But his Tom Ford suits were totally different and, frankly, made me go googly-eyed. They looked nothing short of dangerous, with an ’80s Wall Street vibe in the banker collar shirts and slim, slightly-short double-breasted blazers, set off by languid, almost feminine-cut trousers. The boardroom rainmaker was a core Tom Ford character and is referenced endlessly throughout menswear, but Ackermann’s pinstripe suits felt totally fresh, exquisite uniforms for our new period of ’80s-style cultural excess.

But there was a dark side to the Studio 54 years, which lurked under the surface of Ackermann’s collection like the tank top barely visible under one models’ unbuttoned tuxedo shirt. Many models wore sinister black gloves, so the mind turned to American Psycho—was this date about to go horribly wrong?

Ackermann seemed surprised backstage when I asked about the reference. “Oh, somebody told you about it!” The designer had apparently mentioned on Bella Freud’s podcast—out that morning—that he’d been watching the movie. You could certainly imagine Gen-Z Patrick Bateman wearing Ackermann’s devilishly pointy leather boots. But he added that he was also captivated by Ford’s regal persona. “When you think about Mr. Ford, you think about standing straight in life, it’s all about the posture,” Ackermann said. “You’ve seen him himself, he’s impressive. He’s got attitude and poise, so I had to do it to honor him.
I think that’s one of the DNA and one of the codes of the house.”

Most menswear designers seem lost when it comes to going-out clothes. In Milan, I saw an endless parade of bedazzled garments for the bottle service crowd, clothes you might wear if you had too much money and no real concept of what makes an interesting party. Other designers offered stiff eveningwear that didn’t suggest a passionate approach to life, or seem too concerned with connoisseurship to think of courtship.

Ackermann, a hall-of-fame romantic, conjured the feeling of nocturnal encounters as well as the mornings after. First with hormonal leather stovepipe jeans and matching moto jackets, as well as gleaming black overcoats and matching leather T-shirts, all of which throbbed with desire. But there was a softness against all this sharpness, an intimacy suggesting the satisfying, bleary-eyed stillness after a long, torrid night.

“It’s always been with Mr. Ford about suiting and the red carpet, but there’s the daily life too, and I wanted to embrace that moment,” Ackermann noted. Ethan James Greene, who photographed Ackermann’s first Tom Ford teaser campaign, modeled a cashmere overcoat as white as the bedsheets at the Ritz. One blazer was knit from fuzzy mohair, a rare piece that would get you past a velvet rope but not look too out of place on next morning’s coffee run.