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.
Mr. Ackermann assumed the company’s creative mantle on Tuesday, just weeks after Peter Hawkings, a right-hand man of 25 years to the designer Tom Ford, left the company in July. Mr. Hawkings, the first outsider to oversee design at Tom Ford, took the creative director job in 2023, not long after Mr. Ford sold his stake in his brand to Estée Lauder and the Ermenegildo Zegna Group in a $2.8 billion deal.
If there is justice in fashion (and there seldom is) then Mr. Ackermann’s appointment is something of a vindication: A designer’s designer, he has long been seen as a favorite for top jobs at major brands and was often said to have been Karl Lagerfeld’s choice as his successor at Chanel. (Mr. Lagerfeld ultimately anointed Virginie Viard, who in June announced she was leaving Chanel after five years as its artistic director.)
Mr. Ackermann started his namesake label with a women’s wear collection in the early 2000s before expanding into men’s wear. He recently designed a couture collection for Jean-Paul Gaultier and, from 2016 to 2018, was the creative director at Berluti, where he introduced women’s wear to what had previously been a men’s wear brand.
Seemingly, it was Mr. Ackermann’s finely crafted, beautifully proportioned and chromatically assured Berluti collections that brought him to the attention of Mr. Ford: “I find both his women’s wear and men’s wear equally compelling,” he said in a news release.
Mr. 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 endeavor. Mr. Ackermann, a French national with an international background (he was born in Bogotá, Columbia, 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 Mr. Ford, the brash Texan designer most celebrated for bringing sexy back.
“Haider Ackermann and Tom Ford both possess incredible rigor when it comes to tailoring, add to which Haider’s spectacular use of color,” 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,” Mr. Curtis added. “He was sexy in a most poetic way that aligns with the Ford legacy.”
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