Haider Ackermann’s new clean and lean

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Jun 22, 2017

“My bad boys are getting more mature, and cleaning up their act,” confessed Haider Ackermann, after presenting a streamlined expression of romantic tailoring inside the Hotel Intercontinental Wednesday night.
 

Where his casts in previous years looked like the grandsons of Keith Richards all raggedy and rocker, next spring the Ackermann man is a poised and polished poet.
 
Ackermann is known as a tremendously fluid draper, though this show was more about the construction and control. From his opening looks, where the striped calico and silk trousers were cut with huge pleats allowing to bellow out to the knee before being tapered in at the ankle with fabric ties. His jackets cross over ever so gently with the merest hint of a double-breasted. The narrow lapels reach up to brush the chin like narrow funnels. 

His fabrics were all silky and light – broad stripes mixed with micro polka dots. One three-piece suit in black and white striped silk consisted of a pajama pants, shirt and trench. It will look brilliant in a magazine shoot. Editors and stylists for both men and women love Ackermann precisely because his clothes impart an immediate sense of fantasy.
 
Above all, one sensed all the exotic cultures Ackermann had experienced in his youth as he voyaged through with his mapmaker father in north and east Africa.

 
The show was staged in the legendary Salon Opera ballroom, a soaring neo-classic ballroom of gold leaf décor and ornate plasterwork. It’s a room that has welcomed the likes of Christian Dior, Balmain and Vivienne Westwood over the years, though Ackermann made it his own by creating a mini avenue in the center of halogen lights.
 
Last autumn, Ackermann landed the most plum job in menswear, when he was named creative director of Berluti, the men’s couture house of LVMH. Having a second job often confuses designers. In Ackermann’s case it has led him to focus on his essentials. This collection was a great achievement, a salutary fashion statement by a Colombian-born star about the beauty of multiculturalism.