It’s pouring down rain on West Forty-third Street, but Haider Ackermann, wrapped in his trademark cashmere scarves and the chains he always wears, he says, “for protection,” is dry and cozy, munching on a chocolate-chip cookie in a diner and describing his fantasy woman, the imaginary muse that inspires all his collections. “The lady I try to represent has been in the shadows, wanting to hide and be discrete. She’s outside civilization, she’s unreachable, but now she is coming closer! This season I decided she should come into the light, to be aware of herself and show that she exists. I wanted her to shine!”
And in fact, this formerly elusive femme fatale will be hard to miss in the coming months, wreathed in Ackermann’s bold colors—fire-engine red, mustard, a deep exotic blue—which took the audience by delightful surprise at his spring 2011 runway show in Paris. “To use color is not a easy thing to do,” he admits. “It was a very nice exercise, but you never know how people are going to react,” he adds, clearly grateful for the extremely enthusiastic response the bright hues elicited. “My clothes this season were less twisted, and they have all this draping: It’s as if you want the fashion to faint on the floor, with a kind of negligence—or maybe like a negligee,” he says with a laugh.
The designer, who was raised in Chad, Ethiopia, and Algeria, describes his childhood as having “a sort of bohemian richness in itself. I have so many memories of images. I was always intrigued by what a woman might be wearing under a chador, the movement and the sound of her jewelry,” he says, sighing. “But then again, that’s the past. Now I just want to embrace the future—I am very curious about what life is going to bring me.”
Ackermann now divides his time between Paris and Antwerp, where he graduated from fashion school. He’s in Manhattan only briefly, but while he’s here he’s keeping his eyes open, not just by relishing such resolutely un-chic venues as this diner, but also admiring the innate style of New York street kids. “I love to look at the youth couture here—it’s so much more daring than in Europe. The kids in the streets have so much energy. Let me stay for two months and I’ll draw my whole the collection from what I see here! But perhaps we are always attracted to what we don’t have around us.”