Left: Neil Rasmus/BFA NYCThe designer Haider Ackermann and eight looks from his fall 2011 collection.Haider Ackermann says the words “far away” as though they were a whisper in the wind or a rustle in the grass.
It’s his woman he is talking about, an amalgam of his memories of a childhood in Africa: noble Nigerian robes, a clink of tribal jewelry, the Muslim chador framing the face, women wrapped in swathes of fabric with the body undulating beneath.
A distant woman’s approach is a neat metaphor for a designer whose decade-plus history — since attending the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, interning with John Galliano and setting up his own label in 2003 — is the antithesis of “fast” fashion. The trajectory of this Colombian-born designer has not been exactly slow, but measured.
Now, he is finally having his moment because what he stands for — a gentle approach to a woman’s body, fine fabrics and a non-show-offy attitude — corresponds with the current fashion mood.
I remember sitting at his spring 2007 show in Paris hoping that the leather pieces that wrapped or tied with thin strings would flow together to create a clear silhouette. But it was not to be — just fine materials slipping over the body, or perhaps slit in unlikely places. Even when fishtail skirts dangled on slender cords or legs were revealed in rolled-up shorts, the look was not in the least titillating or provocative. And Ackermann himself has always been the same, smiling gently under his dark curls, as if his mind were elsewhere.
I thought that there was a mournful note to the work, like the call of the muezzin to prayer. Yet the clothes were not sad, although they were often dark, in the way of anthracite storm clouds, a midnight sky or a puddle on a night road.
When Ackermann showed at the spring 2011 men’s shows, there was a rich and joyous embrace of history: candles glowing against the palazzo’s stone walls, and tables groaning with fruit, as in a Caravaggio painting. It was the beginning of color filling the collections with a bright serenity.
I loved listening to the silence of his most recent show, in March — the one that brought “bravos” and an unexpected respite from photographers’ flashbulbs. The sound entered softly as the show progressed and then broke into “A Thousand Kisses Deep” by Leonard Cohen with teal flowering into turquoise and purple darkening to plum.
At first I didn’t register the bared flesh: the narrow windows at the hips or the plunging décolletage. This, I decided, was sensuality — not that all-too-familiar sexualization of fashion. The feeling, although street-smart, is akin to the drapes and pleats of Madame Grès in the 1940s, always respecting the contours of the body. Perhaps Ackermann is mapping the body like his cartographer father mapped the landscape.
“The sensuality of a woman makes her more mysterious,” he said when I asked him about it recently. “If she is unreachable, it makes her more desirable. But my woman is less a stranger — she is coming closer to my sensibility.”
Ackermann’s name first appeared on the radar in May 2009, when Tilda Swinton climbed the steps at Cannes in a jacket over a dark red skirt: the satin poured over her body like fine wine. You don’t think of the carrot-haired Swinton as sexy — more as a powerful and independent woman. Yet in that outfit, her sensual elegance wiped the red-carpeted floor with the starlets in their strapless dresses and boned bodices. The Tilda offering was charisma without cleavage.
Fashion needs leaders to move ahead. A gentle touch — but not a “gentlemanly,” protective one — seems the perfect course after minimalism has cleansed the fashion palette.
There is still a feminist offering in a Haider Ackermann collection, with long tailored coats and pants to stride in.
But there are no dictates here — rather propositions that are the opposite of controlling: a meandering silhouette, hems puddling over the feet, a woman in bloom.
“I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat,” goes Cohen’s poetic lyric in “A Thousand Kisses Deep.”
The violence of current fashion — the speed, the nonstop cycles, the stressed-out designers who wind up as car wrecks — needs some healing: clothes to stroke, to cherish, to embrace.
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