Haider Ackermann follows his heart. It's brought him to some interesting places. Today he's in Paris, where he has lived and worked for the past eight years. That's the longest time he's spent anchored in one location—ever. “I'm not ready to move,” he tells me. We're walking along the busy Rue Saint-Honoré on a sunny summer day. “Unless…unless there is a new love affair—and then I'm out of here again.”
Ackermann's most recent love affair didn't take him away from Paris. If anything, it helped him create a deeper connection to the city. It lasted nearly two years—three seasons, in fashion-speak—and ended with a public breakup that, considering the tumultuous state of the industry in 2018, wasn't exactly surprising but was, for many people, hugely disappointing.
So how did he end up as creative director of Berluti in the first place?
“It was something which was unexpected,” he says. He'd had other offers. Margiela approached him at one point to take the reins. And there were women's designer brands knocking on his door. But Berluti, the 120-year-old French label best known for making exquisitely crafted leather shoes (the house had hardly any menswear offerings up until about 2012, when it launched its first-ever men's ready-to-wear collection), offered him something the others couldn't. And it wasn't just money. For Ackermann, a true romantic, it couldn't be. “If I had done things for financial reasons,” he says, “I would have accepted different things.” But with Berluti, “I was very intrigued and disturbed. And everything which intrigues and disturbs me always wakes up my curiosity.” So in the fall of 2016, he took the job and began his work.
Ackermann's three Berluti collections established a convincing new sartorial identity for the contemporary professional male of limitless financial means. “He was giving a modern touch to the classic luxury brand,” his friend the stylist and editor Robert Rabensteiner told me. “He was bringing a different silhouette to the luxury product.” The clothes were brazenly decadent—caramel lambskin trench coats, gold silk blazers, shimmering velvet suits, all cut with Ackermann's signature slouch—and confidently relaxed, but with a serious, unfussy manner to suit the price tag. “There was always this kind of madness in my world. This daydreamer,” Ackermann says. “And now I was anchored in reality. Business. It was a goal for me to show I can do different things and I can talk about this man who is standing straight in this reality.”
While he worked away on Berluti, Ackermann continued his eponymous label, which he began with a women's collection in 2003, followed by a men's in 2010. And so he became another one of fashion's multifaceted, creative businessmen, in the mold of Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton or Raf Simons at Calvin Klein, ambitiously juggling the high-profile corporate job with the self-built brand. And he was unfazed by the workload: “You know when you just had a new lover? You're so tired that you forget about being tired, you forget about everything, because you're just simply too excited. So yeah, it was a lot. But the excitement makes you forget.”
It was another love affair that, in the mid-'90s, brought Ackermann to Antwerp, Belgium, where he studied fashion design at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He was asked to leave after three years. “I was not the most proper student,” he says, “due to my insecurities, because when you're insecure you don't want to share things. So I preferred to hide away, and I did everything on my terms.”
Ackermann was born in Colombia and was adopted as a baby by a white French family. He has a brother and a sister, also adopted, one from Korea, one from Vietnam. His father worked as a cartographer who traveled the world making maps, and the family went with him. They lived in the Netherlands and across Africa. “When I was younger, I didn't see any creativity in his work,” Ackermann said when I asked him about his father. “But obviously there is. We all try to find our way. We all escape ourselves. He traveled to so many countries. It's a way of escaping where he was coming from—from this little village in the north of France, in Alsace—to escape his youth. Whatever I do, it's a way to escape.”
Living this way, observing people and cultures, from Algeria to the Sahara, made Ackermann sensitive to the movement of textiles and how people cover themselves. “It was always about women being hidden beneath fabric,” he says. “There was something mysterious. You never knew who the woman was underneath. And that mystery, I think, is why I'm now doing fashion, because I thought I would discover more about the woman than anything else.”
Perhaps this made Ackermann alive to his own interior world, a world of his own creation, the result of a lifetime spent as a perpetual foreigner. “When you're living in so many different countries where you don't speak much of the language at first, you build up your own cocoon. You're living in your own world,” he says. “So being the observer and trying to understand how people are communicating or adapting to themselves, it was my way to infiltrate.”
In Antwerp and untethered from the Royal Academy, Ackermann worked at clubs and restaurants, and he lost himself deep in the city's nightlife scene. Then Raf Simons, whom he'd met at school, encouraged him to develop and launch his collection.
Haider Ackermann was the eccentric maximalist before eccentric maximalism was a craze. His collections are, and always have been, raffish and boozy, with the stylish, louche energy of his inspirations Keith Richards and David Bowie, but also a youthful freshness that's just as fly on someone like model and international cool guy Luka Sabbat. You likely won't see a chunky dad sneaker in Ackermann's showroom. (“How many more sneakers can you have in the world?”) Instead, he is the silky, slouchy, velvety drape god, and when all the trends have come and gone, his very specific, sexy—yes, his men's clothes are sexy as hell—elegance will remain.
Ackermann's tenure at Berluti was brief and ended abruptly. As LVMH—the largest luxury conglomerate on earth, under the leadership of Bernard Arnault, the richest man in France—underwent a complete overhaul of its men's fashion business, Ackermann was restructured out of a job. “You don't want love affairs to end that soon, that abruptly,” he says. But when we arrive at his studio and office at the end of our walk, I note that he's still wearing Berluti from head to toe and that there's a stack of Berluti shoeboxes in his office. “It's like when you break up but you still love the person you had been with,” he says. “I'm still close with all my exes. I'm proud of the work that I did with the team at Berluti.”
The end result of LVMH's creative-director shuffle is, in fact, one of the most significant changes to happen in the history of men's fashion. Kim Jones was elevated from his role as top dog for the men's division at Louis Vuitton (the LV in LVMH) to Dior, and Virgil Abloh was put in his place, making Abloh the first-ever African-American in such a position at a European luxury house. Kris Van Assche, who was in charge of Dior men's for 11 years, took over at Berluti. If Ackermann holds a grudge against those designers or the industry, he hides it well. He was present to support Jones at his Dior runway debut in June, and he was wearing a pair of Abloh-designed, Abloh-inscribed Converse when we met.
“It's an interesting moment,” he says. Whatever the outcome, he seems excited by what the future holds. “All for good reason. Newness is what fashion is about, anyway. People come and go, and there are new stories, and it continues. And that's fair enough.”
At a Haider Ackermann show, whether for his own label or for Berluti, you experience firsthand—and hear in the applause at the end—just how devoted and loving Ackermann's community is. It's easy to see how his somewhat transient youth has led him to invest emotionally in connections with people. Kanye West and Nicki Minaj were early supporters. And he has built deep friendships with celebrities who have chosen him to style them (“I never contacted them. I would never dare. I'm far too shy for it”), including his primary muse to any observer, Tilda Swinton, and the young movie star Timothée Chalamet.
Ackermann and Chalamet have become one of the most endearing celebrity-fashion friendships of the Instagram age. “Timo,” Ackermann says. “My little bro.” Chalamet wore Berluti designed by Ackermann for one of his first red-carpet events, the premiere of Call Me by Your Name, at the Berlin film festival, and again for the 2018 Oscars, where Chalamet was up for Best Actor alongside Gary Oldman and Daniel Day-Lewis. The white tux he wore was a confident—maybe even iconic—look for the 22-year-old. “He was the young dude between all those massive actors,” says Ackermann. “I wanted him to be pure. We did it, and we built up this story together. It's a beautiful friendship.”
In 2013, Ackermann was invited back to his birth country to be celebrated and ordained as cultural ambassador of Colombia, an honor he holds along with Gabriel García Márquez and Fernando Botero. “For them, I'm a Colombian who followed his dreams and, despite everything, made it happen for himself,” Ackermann says. Because of his unconventional childhood, he feels like a stranger wherever he goes. But in Colombia it was different: “There was something smooth about it. I didn't have to prove that I was coming from them. There was already something that felt quite home. There was an easiness toward it.”
According to the Internet, Ackermann is 47. He sports century-old wire-rimmed glasses, a trimmed mustache, and a short crop of curly jet-black hair that remains cherubic. He's often dressed like a clone of one of his runway models: silk scarf belt, drop-crotch trousers, a buoyant-looking bomber jacket. Ackermann has said that with his men's line, he is searching for himself, someone he would like to be. But today he says, “Just give me a white T-shirt, black trousers, and a nice pair of shoes, and I'm fine.”
In a week, he'll embark on one of his now legendary “family” vacations with his closest friends, actor-designer Waris Ahluwalia, designer Umit Benan, stylist Robert Rabensteiner, and Tilda Swinton. Together they've been to Thailand, the Maldives, Bhutan, India, Kenya… “So we're all leaving next week to Turkey, I think,” he says. You think? At some point, exact details simply matter less. “It's just about gathering. It's about getting together, exchanging moments. We get a big house, get together and…dance.” Ackermann seems to have a special ability to form loyal, lasting relationships. Perhaps that's why he keeps the stack of Berluti shoeboxes in his office. “These moments that we are very free,” Rabensteiner tells me by phone, after their time together in Turkey (“Four endless days,” according to Ackermann). “We let go of our daily life for work and we don't try to talk too much about work, but we talk about the beauty surrounding us.”
When I ask Ackermann how many languages he speaks, he says “not many,” then proceeds to use fingers on both hands to count them. I think that his unique vision for style—a fusion of so many far-flung and distinct things that it seems like something entirely original—must come from his having wandered the world, the son of a mapmaker, finding his way and discovering new things about people and about himself as he's gone along. “To belong nowhere and everywhere at the same time—there's quite a sense of freedom to it,” he says.
But doesn't he ever get tired of always being in motion? Isn't it nice to sometimes stop and have a minute to himself? “The moment you are high in the clouds on a mountain in Bhutan is also this moment that you are perhaps closer to yourself,” he says. “Because you are in such a quiet place. You're closer to yourself than you would ever be in Paris, because in Paris you're confronted with daily life. But up there you have time to reflect and to think. The distance might be further away, but it's so much more close to home.”
When you've lived all over the world, when you've been the creative director of a luxury brand, when you've chased love across as many borders as Ackermann has, home is on top of a mountain in Bhutan—or wherever the next journey, or love affair, might take him. Ackermann says that if he could do it all again with Berluti, he absolutely would. He says this with such certainty that I feel compelled to ask, Do you have something lined up?
“We'll see,” he says. “Everything is moving in fashion, and that's what fashion is about. So we are all there at some point, and we are all gone at some point.”
Noah Johnson is a GQ Style senior editor.
This story appears in the fall 2018 issue of GQ Style with the title “The Nomadic Mind of Haider Ackermann”
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