Timothée Chalamet: Haider Ackermann’s “Beloved TIMO BRO!”

Timothée Chalamet is at the Venice Film Festival promoting the Henry V biopic The King, but he’s also there writing a new chapter in a beautiful fashion love story of our time: the one between himself and Colombian-French designer Haider Ackermann.

To the red carpet premiere of the film last night, Chalamet wore an extremely advanced pale gray cotton silk and satin suit with a double belt at the waist, with his pants rolled up to reveal a righteous pair of black cowboy boots. (The louchely rolled cuff is a signature of Ackermann’s personal style.) Earlier that day, Chalamet wore a day suit in the same color, with a Nehru collar jacket and a sky blue shirt peeking out from underneath. (Chalamet's hero—and now buddy—Kid Cudi joined him on the red carpet. It's good to be the King.)

Ackermann and Chalamet have been working together since the latter’s awards-season campaign for Call Me by Your Name, when Ackermann was turning out precise, crisply avant-garde suiting for the Italian house Berluti. Ackermann made the white tux that Chalamet wore to the Oscars, among other looks. He left the brand last year (“It's like when you break up but you still love the person you had been with,” he told GQ a few months after his departure. “I'm still close with all my exes”), and soon after began combining the men’s and women’s collections of his self-titled brand. “It’s a love affair, and I’m your man,” he told Vogue after his Spring 2019 show. “You love the thing about him and her, and how they might intertwine. It’s just a borrowing.”

Chalamet’s suit is a pitch-perfect representation of that attitude, and a perfect entrée in the emerging Sexy Menswear movement, where gender fluidity borrows more from the softness and sensuality of womenswear than the androgynous tailoring of menswear. Speaking to GQ last summer, Ackermann, who also regularly dresses red carpet svengali Tilda Swinton, called Chalamet “my little bro” and added that “we built up this story together. It's a beautiful friendship.” The designer has been hanging out with Chalamet at the festival, presumably offering personal styling tips from his own arsenal and capturing “beloved TIMO BRO” on a water taxi. Here it is, at last: menswear's first great designer-muse relationship!