Robert Mapplethorpe & Patti Smith.

Backstage Haider Ackermann.

Sandro Kopp’s painting of Tilda Swinton.

Some/things magazine Issue001.

Hannelore Knuts is one of the most successful models Belgian models today, she works for Jean Paul Gaultier, Azzedine Alaïa, Miuccia Prada, Yohji Yamamoto, Haider Ackermann and others. She's the new face of Designers Against Aids, the Belgian based organization campaigning for AIDS awareness safe sex.

World renowned Belgian make-up artist Peter Phillips for Haider Ackermann, their working relationship and their shared aesthetic.

Photos by belgian photographer Willy Vanderperre.

Raf Simons relaunches his online platform...www.rafsimons.com.

Cannes Film Festival 2009: Tilda Swinton wearing dresses from Haider Ackerman Fall/Winter 2009/2010 collection.

”I can’t actually remember first meeting Haider,” Swinton says. ”I’m guessing it was in super-off-duty circumstances, possibly singing Chinese karaoke, but it was about seven years ago. I have been wearing his clothes since I first saw them. He has become a very good friend, and we feel in close sync in terms of general sensibility.” Safe to say that Swinton’s style is anything but prissy: ”There is something very louche about Haider’s dresses — they feel like good dresses to be completely at ease in.”

Roger Ballen showes is work in the gallery "Fifty One Fine Art Photography", Antwerp-Belgium.
Roger Ballen’s confronting photography holds an intensity that betrays deep stories lurking below the surface, subjects with a story to tell and scenes with intricate subtexts. He works in a style that allows and celebrates the untouched, raw details of real life South African born and based, Ballen has often taken subjects from the remote villages of his native Johannesburg.

Berlinde de Bruyckere contribute to A magazine #3 by Haider Ackermann
A series of Berlinde’s work was photographed by Mirjam Devriendt, with some pieces shot from two contrasting angles to add impact and offer multiple perspectives.

Ann Demeulemeester contribute to A magazine #3 by Haider Ackermann

In her contribution to Haider Ackermann’s A#3, Ann shows a touching and personal collection of polaroid images, with this view contradicted by the woman herself, as she lifts the supposed ‘gloom’ and reveals a light, fresh and unequivocally human aesthetic.

Raf Simons contribute to A magazine #3 by Haider Ackermann

The always poetic and mysterious mind of Raf Simons offers up a formidable slew of historical and social references in his personal exploration of masculinity and youth culture through fashion design. For his contribution to A#3 for Haider Ackermann he gives no less, with this simple yet powerful photographic and literary piece.

Simons takes ‘Siddhartha’, the canonical novel by German writer Hermann Hesse, and graphically reinterprets it amongst other Hesse references, for powerful effect. The words “UNBROKEN SIDDHARTHA RETURNED” are granted prime position across a full page each, and allude to the spiritual journey of the novel’s protagonist Siddhartha, his search for an enlightened state and his discovery of an eternal cycle of life.

New York’s Sonnabend Gallery:
Hiroshi Sugimoto Seascapes

Tilda Swinton, for A#3 by Haider Ackermann, has offered a philosophical essay on the subject of loneliness.

A Magazine #3 curated by Haider Ackerman.

The Nomad Arrives

It’s hard to know exactly when a designer goes from newcomer to trendsetter. Occasionally, fashion catches up to an aesthetic that was ahead of its time. Or a season gravitates toward specific style quirks. Sometimes it’s just plain luck. In any event, and for whatever reason, it seems clear that Haider Ackermann is making that jump.
Ackermann started showing in Paris in 2002 and almost immediately became a cult favorite. After his debut, he was tapped by the Italian leather company Ruffo, which at the time invited young talents to design its experimental Ruffo Research line. (Raf Simons and Sophia Kokosalaki were also Ruffo Researchers.) Ackermann received encouraging reviews and quietly started building a community of fans. In 2004 he got a leg up after winning the Swiss Textiles Award at the Gwand fashion festival in Lucerne, which included a prize of 100,000 euros (about $133,000 at the time) that gave him some room to grow. In 2005 he guest-edited an issue of A Magazine, featuring work by Steven Klein, Cris Brodahl and Roger Ballen, among others. Last year he curated an exhibition at Villa Noailles, as part of the Hyères fashion festival in the South of France.

It was Ackermann’s fall 2009 presentation, however, that fully showed off his maturity. The elements he has been developing for years were all there: rich, moody colors; lots of draping; sexily distressed leather jackets. But there was also a new rigor in his mannishly tailored jackets, and a sure hand in the burnished gold sequins and seductive Indian- and African-inspired embroideries. They were the kind of clothes worn by women whose sense of confidence does not depend on vanity or effort — which explains why Ackermann’s friend Tilda Swinton slunk onto the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival, a few months after the show, wearing one of his dresses.


Ackermann was born in Colombia but was adopted by French parents and lived a peripatetic childhood. His father was a cartographer, and his work took the family to Iran, Chad, Ethiopia and Algeria before Ackermann was 12; they then moved to the Netherlands. That early nomadism had a formative effect on Ackermann’s work. ”When you live so many years abroad, you belong nowhere,” he says. ”So for this collection I had the idea of a woman who was traveling, going somewhere from nowhere, taking all her treasures with her, like a little soldier.”
[...]
When Ackermann moved to Antwerp in 1994 to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, broody and cerebral Belgians like Martin Margiela and Ann Demeulemeester were very much in vogue. ”You can imagine how I felt when I was a boy living in Africa seeing all the glittering gold and all the different colors,” Ackermann says. ”My initial aesthetic was built on that, but then I went to Belgium and everything was dark and gray, and I became attracted to the complete opposite. Now I try to combine both elements.”
[...]

Piece of The Nomad Arrives by Armand Limnander from T Magazine, August 16th, 2009.

Autumn Winter 2009/2010