Haider Ackermann Reinvents Tom Ford’s Classic Sex Appeal

In 2001, Ackermann launched his own label to acclaim in Paris, finding support from Belgian group BVBA 32, a brand management company founded by designer Ann Demeulemeester and her husband Patrick Robyn that would become the parent company to both Demeulemeester and Ackermann’s eponymous labels under CEO Anne Chapelle.

Ackermann quickly grew from new-kid-on-the-block to wunderkind: He declined an offer to succeed Martin Margiela in 2009, opting for his independence. In 2010, Karl Lagerfeld said he thought Ackermann could be his successor at Chanel. And when Galliano was fired from Dior in 2011, Ackermann was rumored to have been approached to replace him. Between 2016 and 2018, he spent three seasons—a very short stint, even by the brutal standards of fashion’s never-ending game of designer musical chairs—designing Berluti. Impactful as his collections were, Ackermann was arguably not the right fit for a brand whose primary business came from accessories and leather goods. Ackermann, in all his genius, is a fashion designer. A good man to task with whipping up a red-carpet ensemble, but perhaps not to lead a brand that sells shoes and belts to somewhat conservative-looking men as its primary preoccupation. His exit was not considered a failure, but rather an unfortunate misalliance.

As the industry rooted for Ackermann, he continued to work on his eponymous label, known for its severity and svelte look, demonstrating a rare, happy marriage between sharp tailoring and weightless draping. It gained him a slew of close celebrity relationships that would eventually become very public muses—Timothée Chalamet and Tilda Swinton, most notably.

But the brand was plagued by its convoluted financial history and shut down in 2020 when Chapelle pulled her financial support.

By 2021, he was missing in action. Chapelle had kept the rights to the Haider Ackermann name in the fallout of their business partnership and, it seemed, opportunities elsewhere had dried up. Somehow, Ackermann had become a cautionary tale. He had already built a respectable career, but the chance to enter the pantheon of the greats eluded him—until now.

“I try to be quite discreet with my life,” Ackermann says, after a much-celebrated first year at Tom Ford. “To be really honest,” he says, “at this point in my career, I’m not trying anymore.”

Ackermann’s arrival at Tom Ford delighted the industry, and many could see how he made sense as the man to fill in the space left by Ford. Their design vernaculars seemed to have always been in conversation, with their understanding of sensuality existing in parallel spaces, even if their expression of it was different. In Ford’s case, it was audacious and bold, and in Ackermann’s, it was subtle and insinuative.

Ackermann, however, wasn’t the one chosen as Ford’s immediate successor. Following the sale of the Tom Ford brand to Estée Lauder Companies in April 2023 for $2.8 billion and prior to Ackermann’s appointment in late 2024, Peter Hawkings took the creative helm. The Brit had worked alongside Ford for some 25 years, first at Gucci and subsequently at Tom Ford. His brief stint lasted a year, with his two runway shows landing more like a playlist of Tom Ford’s greatest hits than a proposition for its revitalization. The industry received the announcement of Ackermann in September, after Hawkings’s defenestration in July, warmly and with an exhale—the legacy of Tom Ford, one of fashion’s most prolific contemporary designers, appeared secure.

It also felt like fashion was presenting Ackermann the increasingly rare opportunity to stage a comeback, to at last arrive.

“Well, what I learned over the years is that a career is never very linear,” he says. “You build through moments of doubt, of risk, of reinvention, of patience, of so much. It’s such a rollercoaster of things that pass into your life. So for me, what I’m doing now doesn’t feel like an arrival,” Ackermann says. “It feels more like a continuation of everything that I’ve been doing to the point that it leads to this moment,” he says. Now turning more esoteric, he delivers a mission statement: “For me, basically, my work is just a question of searching for beauty and to try to bring a kind of dignity into the work and the kind of discipline and elegance.”

By late 2022, Ackermann’s name had regained some traction. In September, he outfitted Chalamet in a red halterneck top—seen across the internet—for the Venice Film Festival. In November of that year, he returned to the runway in Manchester with a collaboration with Fila. And the following January, as rumours swirled that Ackermann had regained ownership of his own name, he became a guest couturier for Jean Paul Gaultier. That collection landed as a statement: Ackermann was ready for more. And more came soon after in the shape of Tom Ford.

In March of this year, Ackermann hosted his third runway show for Tom Ford at a small but elegant pavilion on the Place Vendôme in Paris. Since debuting at Tom Ford in March of 2025, his runway shows have become one of the most covetable tickets at Paris Fashion Week.

His front row was the stuff of fashion mythology, the kind of group that could only be summoned by a muse collector of Ackermann’s caliber. Kate Moss and Daphne Guinness whispered into each other’s ears; generational heartthrobs Lee Pace and Paul Anthony Kelly sat side-by-side, not too far from Ricky Martin and Countess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, the Japanese artist, who, looking calmly at the models, sat a few seats down from filmmaker Baz Luhrmann and costume designer Catherine Martin.

While Ackermann says he is “terribly shy,” his collections are anything but. They are dangerously alluring, and as Ackermann and I discuss the nuances of sensuality, he acknowledges that times have changed since the ’90s, when Ford brazenly sold sex as fashion. Brands today need nuance to be titillating—nudity and provocation are too available. But his runway shows exude desire: Models cruise one another, locking eyes with each other and the audience, prancing in razor-sharp tailoring and figure-hugging sheaths that expose just the right amount of skin—the upper chest, a hipbone, a sliver of midriff—a hypnotic performance. No other designer has synthesized erotic tension with such aplomb since Ford himself. “Seduction is so beautiful because it makes you insecure, doubtful, fragile, beautiful, strong, fearful. I mean, every word of the vocabulary,” he says. “We all want to be desired. We all want to desire someone.”

It is now Ackermann’s responsibility to synthesize that yearning for a new generation.

“I don’t want to imitate his legacy, because nostalgia is not for me,” he says of Ford. Many have already mined Ford’s design vernacular, few with the original gusto. “I need to make it breathe in a certain way, in a new way,” Ackermann says.

In an industry landscape where runway shows are ambitious cinematic productions and collections oftentimes feel like they are pandering to the internet for virality, Ackermann wants his Tom Ford to make the argument for discretion. “The voices are loud outside,” he says. “I just want it to be this discreet, silent, but silence doesn’t mean boring. Silence sometimes has more force than loudness,” he continues. “Discretion is elegance, and that’s what we need.”

Ackermann says he likes to sit at bars or bistros and watch people passing in front of him. “It’s my theater,” he says.

If Tom Ford as envisioned by the man himself felt like the most glamorous of nights out, Ackermann considers his iteration of the brand the liminal space that follows.

“It has always been about the night, and trust me, I had my wild days,” he says, but he is getting older, “and the morning after always fascinates me more than the event itself,” he says.

Following the show, photographer Sebastián Faena met Ackermann and his entourage for a portrait sitting. With the help of a few martinis and flutes of champagne, the raucous lineup of friends, muses, and confidantes sat still long enough to take the portrait accompanying this story.

“I am the original waif!” Moss jokingly said as she and Kristen McMenamy battled for the spotlight. McMenamy stood, front and center, to a grunt from Moss. Moss took her place next to Ackermann, who swept her off her feet, leaving one of her stilettos behind. “You’ll end up in the gutter!” McMenamy joked—she meant the fold of the magazine. (But did she?)