From The Issue: Anders Christian Madsen Talks To Haider Ackermann

Whenever you go backstage after one of Haider Ackermann’s shows – men’s or women’s – you can be sure of one thing: he will give you an elusive declaration on the state of the world, the material one or possibly his own.

I suspect he likes the interpretation game or maybe his distinct aesthetics simply move so slowly and confidently the motives often remain the same. He’s an old soul with old-fashioned principles, and this social media-fuelled fashion landscape isn’t the easiest territory for a designer like him to navigate. “The only obligation you have is trying to make beautiful clothes. It’s the only thing you’ve got to say,” he once told me on the subject.

In his world, old-school virtues of craftsmanship and artisanal values easily trump fast fashion and the promotion circus it brings. “We need explosions of shiny things. We need this kind of freedom,” he said at his gilded AW16 men’s show. “It’s a tough world outside. I wanted to have this kind of gracefulness and brightness and peace to show the other side of what we are confronted with every day,” he echoed at his women’s show that same season.

Like the soulmate to the womenswear he first launched 14 years ago, his menswear – introduced in 2013 – is a culturally eclectic, glam-rock take on rakish salon dressing. It’s a template of louche loungewear, if you will, for the wistful modern dandy, to which Ackermann applies his mood du jour.

His SS17 men’s show marked his most shocking interpretation of it to date. A rainy staging in the neoclassicist courtyard of Palais Galliera in Paris glistening from techno lights, this was a louder Ackermann – a social commentator more to the point.

“It was an orgy of colours,” he told me. “You know, when you’re clubbing and sweating? It was about a whole night out and making it a little more poetic. I have this gang of young kids around me and they’re so full of energy and, you know, I’m getting older and when you see what’s happening in the world you sometimes get a little bit… ” He paused solemnly.

This was the summer of nonstop terror attacks in France and Germany, of Brexit, and Trump looming on horizon. “They’re just kids who want to party and want to be happy,” he continued. “They’re this generation who want to be happy. They don’t have the worries that we might have. They’re full-on, and I wanted to capture that energy.”

Following a trip to Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom whose religious dress has often found its way into his collections, Ackermann had cut off his trademark Beethoven bob in favour of a shorter style. “I wanted to be very light,” he mused. “It’s the most beautiful country in the world. It’s so quiet and you’re high in the clouds because you’re up in the mountains and everything is peaceful.” This kind of whimsical poetry comes easy to Ackermann, who wouldn’t have felt out of place in the eras of Lord Byron or Charles Baudelaire, even if the latter was too gloomy for his optimistic liking.

The 45-year-old designer came to be this way not by proxy, but by aspiration. “I think I’m very bourgeois at the end of the day,” he once told me, admitting he had longed for that kind of life while growing up. Adopted from the ghetto of Bogota, Columbia, in 1971 by a French cartographer and his wife, Ackermann had a peripatetic upbringing between Chad, Ethiopia and Nigeria, before the family settled in Holland when he was 12.

His parents now live in the south of France, and Ackermann is French. Not Dutch and not Belgian, as some presume, although his studio is based in Antwerp, where he also studied at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts before he was kicked out after three years. “He couldn’t finish his studies,” fellow student Raf Simons once noted, and you don’t have to read far into Ackermann’s escapism to understand why.