In the 19th century, leading American spiritualists were into the idea of Summerland: an afterlife that was a personalised heaven of sorts. It could be a little house on the prairie; a rococo mansion; one long glade filled with butterflies and lambs and other nice things. But a Haussmannian atelier two storeys above Paris’s Place de Madeleine feels pretty close to a universal paradise. Cloud-white walls reach up high, buffered from the ceiling by a fine cornice horizon. Three huge mirrors surround an angular wooden bench. There’s a distant tinkling of a piano’s ivories from somewhere. It’s almost comically tranquil (or comically French, I can’t decide). And in this sanctuary sits the designer Haider Ackermann. He likes it here too.
“I love living in Paris,” he says, rolling his eyes and grinning. “For God’s sake, I am French. In Paris you can disappear; I don’t have that sense in other cities. You always meet people, bump into people. But here? That doesn’t happen at all.” He looks out of the window, pausing for a moment to admire the crisp September sunlight like a very happy cat. “I love to bike around early in the morning at 6am and discover new streets and new angles and new corners. It’s amazing.”
Paris, with its hellish traffic, doesn’t seem like the most obvious place of monastic peace. But for someone like Ackermann, to go incognito is a gift. The fashion designer has a name that commands almost universal respect in an industry prone to mob mentality – grab your digital pitchforks, brothers, a creative director has choked. Not so with Ackermann. Everyone seems to like him. Even the mean ones in the fashion press corps like him. But more importantly, everyone is excited by him – now more than ever. After taking the reins of Canada Goose in May, he’s just been officially appointed the successor to the Tom Ford throne. “I’ve been… working,” Ackermann says, not-so-fresh from a New-York-to-Paris red eye. Still, despite the lack of sleep, his face cracks into a wry, barely there smile. He cuts a warm figure that belies a Google Image search, which nets a collection of serious greyscale portraits. He is blessed with cherubic black curls and impressive angles. He smiles a lot. He leans in conspiratorially. Ackermann moves my espresso towards me, an open palm silently gesturing for me to enjoy: “Yes, quite busy lately.”
The Tom Ford announcement generated the same amount of noise as a major Premier League signing – and the same level of media fervour. “A perfect match for a sexy brand?” asked The New York Times. “He will knock the ball out of the park, this is an appointment you can feel excited about,” wrote one user on fashion-nerd subreddit r/whatthefrockk. Over on YouTube, style pundit Fashion Roadman quickly dropped a video titled “Will Haider Ackermann Transform Tom Ford’s Legacy?” It’s a huge engagement, and a move to such a deep-pocketed company requires one to do the rounds with the stakeholders, the shareholders and the holdovers. (Estée Lauder acquired Tom Ford for £2.15 billion in 2022.) That is a job in itself. But Ackermann has always been busy building and nurturing his own plot in fashion’s landscape. His patch is colourful, fertile and regal. His work – for Berluti, on red carpets, at a watershed 2010 Florence menswear debut – manages to dazzle without ever tiptoeing into the gauche. And while that translates well to deeply exquisite runway shows, it has worked at Canada Goose, too. For an out-and-out outdoors brand, Ackermann’s turn was always going to riff on some idea of gorpcore. That’s a tough gig when so many critics prophesied the trend’s doom. But where a slew of outdoor-tech brands oscillate between apocalypse chic and “aw, shucks” comfort, Ackermann’s version is closer to a utopian elegance. The temperature of the future may be at freezing, but his sculptural, billowing parkas could settle the Arctic in pops of emerald green, rose pink and electric blue. The expeditionary hats are sharp, almost aerodynamic, and skew closer to Stetsons. In Ackermann’s winter palace, all is well – and acutely tasteful. “It’s not a question of reinvention. I don’t think that’s the purpose I have. It’s just to put a little bit of electricity in there,” he says. “The Canada Goose archives have the most fluorescent colours: pink, orange, yellow, all back in the days of 1957. Now you can go into the shop, and it’s muted colours – navy blue, black – so I try to embrace that older part.”
He’s been drawn to vibrancy since his childhood, which was pretty unconventional. “I grew up in Africa. Ethiopia, Chad and Nigeria,” says Ackermann, the Colombian-born adopted son of an Alsatian cartographer. “Then we moved to Holland when I was 12. A few years there, then Belgium.” It was here he began his formal fashion education at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts – a place that felt like the polar opposite to his worldly youth. “I didn’t feel at home there. Due to my past, I always kind of felt like a stranger. Sometimes there’s a comfort to being a stranger. You’re the observer,” he says. “But in Antwerp, I didn’t feel like the good stranger. I came from countries that were so bright and colourful. But here, the sky was so low, it felt like you could almost reach out and touch it.” Despite this, and an expulsion from art school for failing to turn in coursework, his tutelage was also a hard-won lesson in how he could improve his fashion standing, and his understanding of it. “It was not a circus,” he says. “In Antwerp, there’s so much respect for the person who wears the clothes. You carry the clothes more than a lot of other countries. There’s a beauty to that.”
This masterful tightrope walk between fantasy and function has been perfected over the better part of three decades. His signature is sci-fi, but sumptuous; sexual, but subtle. The resulting Haider Ackermann own-label stans are many. They take it seriously, too. Johann, a model in Stuttgart, is quite proud of a funnel-necked sweatshirt in a very Haider shade of Martian desert: “I was going through this vintage store in the city called Vintendo Archive. The simplicity [of the sweatshirt] stood out really. Even though you can wear it as a statement piece, you can also just wear it as a normal basic.” Francis Kassatly, a TikTok fashion pundit who encourages people to “buy less, buy better, wear it more”, is into Ackermann’s “heavy use of noble fibres like silk and cashmere”. He’s followed the designer for years, too: “I was in my 20s, so I had to buy intentionally. The first item I ever purchased was a gold velvet bomber with ruched sleeves. It was a size too large but I grew into it over time. It’s eight years old now, but wearing it still feels as fresh as day one.”
Ackermann feels like a serious fan himself – especially of the auteurs of fashion who seem to float above the marketing-product churn. “Luxury needs to be defined,” he says, when asked about the industry’s current state. “Oh my God, so many luxury houses don’t feel luxury for me. They don’t make me dream like they used to. We only talk about sales and figures but we have a responsibility to the next generation. I remember so many designers that made me dream, whether it was Mr Saint Laurent, or Helmut Lang, Rei Kawakubo; all of them.” I ask if all the dreamers have been lost to this insomniac world of profit margins and bottom lines. “All is never lost,” he says. “Look at the work of Rick Owens, or [Nicolas] Ghesquière, or Comme des Garçons. I look up to them all.”
