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