Haider Ackermann Is GQ’s Designer of the Year

On a beautiful evening in July, Haider Ackermann is sitting on the roof of his Tom Ford design studio in Paris. It’s golden hour on one of the longest days of the year, i.e., well past quitting time, yet the office is still frantic with activity. When I note the hour, the designer responds with a wistful sigh. “When you have a new love affair, you just want to go for it,” he says. “You don’t count the hours. You’re not tired, because you just have this love going through your veins. It makes your heart beat and it keeps you up at night.”

The Colombian-born French designer was named creative director of Tom Ford in the fall of 2024, and the relationship had aroused all of men’s fashion. In fact, Ackermann’s March debut suggested that he might be the most seductive designer working today. In a small auditorium just off Place Vendôme, guests entered the dimly lit confines of a make-believe private room somewhere between the Studio 54 that Mr. Ford (as Ackermann invariably refers to him) used to frequent and the hedonistic clubs of Ackermann’s Antwerp youth. Once the preshow martinis were polished off, models skulked around the room in clothes that had a titillating, intimate edge. There were ’80s banker-pinstripe suits cut with long, languid trousers; silk robes and playful pops of color; a tuxedo shirt unbuttoned to the tank top underneath.

It wasn’t sexy in the traditional sense. There were no bared pectorals or exposed washboard abs. There weren’t even any short shorts, which many designers still seem to think have aphrodisiacal qualities. Ackermann has always known a better way to get the pulse racing, which is to let the audience’s imagination take over. On the runway, it looked as if the models had thrown their clothes on in the morning after a steamy tryst—one guy even had a supple tweed jacket draped over his cruisy leather getup, a newspaper tucked in his tote bag. Ackermann took his bow to a standing ovation led by Mr. Ford himself.

As we share a beer on the roof, Ackermann acknowledges that this is no time to come up for air. How many first dates are driven by blind passion, while the sober second is a flop? Ackermann speaks thoughtfully but definitively, with a French-inflected purr. “It’s time to start the real work!” he says. “And try to continue this dialogue to put my own, not my own language on it, but my own accent on it.”

In other words, Ackermann is still figuring out how much of himself to insert into the Tom Ford universe. Ackermann’s own style is a passionate dance between classic and exotic, formal and something wilder. (His swashbuckling aesthetic speaks to why luxury outerwear brand Canada Goose also tapped Ackermann as its first creative director last year.) On the roof, he is dressed as if he’s trying to decide whether to have dinner at the Ritz Paris or a Bedouin campsite, with a cream silk paisley shirt and matching scarf paired with frayed vintage indigo trousers and inky velvet slippers. His mustache is trim and his curly black locks are abundant and Rubenesque. “Perhaps I want somewhere to be a Mr. Ford, very immaculate and perfect,” he says. “I’m looking up to that, but you put me in a suit, and two minutes later it’s, like, debauchery.”