Haider Ackermann has found his place. There’s only one Tom Ford, but Ackermann shares the brand founder’s flair for the cinematic, and he directs his models like they were actors on a movie set. “I told them I want them to seduce. They’re aware they’re seducing, but they act as if they’re not aware of it—it’s all this kind of game,” he said backstage in the quiet before the show began.
They certainly didn’t move like models on other runways, with their unsmiling, bored faces and their wiggleless hips. Ackermann’s girls and boys slithered and slinked their way up a glossy dark blue set, trying for eye contact with the audience, or casting side glances at their fellow catwalkers. Erin O’Connor and Scott Barnhill, in hers and his navy silk suits and matching slicked-back haircuts, put their arms around each other, like old friends or new lovers. David Bowie was singing about lovers in a searing acapella version of “Heroes” on the soundtrack.
“It’s all about a midnight swim,” Ackermann shared. “In the summer I like to take a dive in the ocean at midnight. I think that’s the most dangerous and sexy thing in the world.” Those are two qualities Ford would co-sign. He’d likely also appreciate the patent leather pieces laser-cut with tiny slits that looked like they’d taken a dip in the ocean too. Though there were no straight-up bathing suits, there was more bare skin here than at Ackermann’s debut last season. On the girls, little triangle bra tops stood in for shirts; and on the boys, jockstraps were clearly visible beneath teeny sheer shorts.
With their wire construction, evening numbers defied gravity, the single strap of an asymmetric long dress arching over the shoulders to cup the opposite breast. Others challenged decorum à la Rudi Gernreich’s monokini and an Ackermann collection of old (see spring 2011) featuring topless dresses suspended via the barest of strings from somewhere south of the navel. Ackermann has quickly mastered Ford’s signature panache, but here he let his own distinctive style shine through.
And then there was the color—lime green, baby pink, and mint satin pantsuits; draped dresses and skirts in orange and pool blue; all of it standing out all the more in the so deep-blue-it’s-almost-black of the show space. For the finale, Ackermann cranked up the smoke machine, a signature move of his own from way back. Consider us seduced.
