THE JOURNEY IS THE DESTINATION

Born in Colombia, raised in Africa, schooled in Belgium and based in France, fashion nomad Haider Ackermann has found a new home as the creative director of Berluti

Well-travelled fashion designer Haider Ackermann finds a home at Berluti

I can’t remember why, but Haider Ackermann and I are talking horses. He’s a big fan of riding, which is odd considering he’s been on a horse only once. “I was in Colombia recently, and they had this beautiful stallion,” the 46-year-old designer tells me as we sit down at the Berluti offices in Paris one warm summer afternoon. “I’d never ridden, so when I got on, he and I just turned and took off. We rode into the jungle, me just hanging on. It was near an area controlled by Farc [Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia], so when I signed the insurance waiver before, they said, ‘Don’t go there!’ Of course, the horse and I went there.”

This moment sort of sums up Haider Ackermann. He’s new to this. He’s a bit unpredictable. And right now he’s saddled up for an exhilarating, and potentially risky, ride.

In September 2016, Berluti CEO Antoine Arnault (part of the family behind French luxury titan LVMH) hired Ackermann as its creative director. It’s the latest move in a decades-long strategy to transform the 122-year-old French shoemaker into a byword for luxury menswear. The transformation dates back to LVMH’s acquisition of the company in 1993, followed by Arnault’s hiring of designer Alessandro Sartori in 2011 and the expansion into ready-to-wear in 2012. Over the past five years, Berluti has increased annual sales by more than £130m, but though the gap is shrinking, the company has yet to turn a profit. Ackermann’s ascent could mark a turning point for the fashion house, as the designer injects the traditionally elegant Berluti man with some modern-day swagger.

Ackermann’s journey has had its share of twists and turns. Born in Bogotá, he had a barnstorming childhood that saw stints in Nigeria, Algeria, Iran, Chad and the Netherlands as his family followed its cartographer patriarch. It was during these formative years that the future designer mapped trends and traced the styles that serve as the inspiration for his “modern

nomad” aesthetic. A huge daydreamer as a kid, Ackermann says even his parents didn’t think he would amount to much. “But in my mind, things were clear. I knew there was a road I had to take.” At 17, he left home for Amsterdam and ended up studying fashion design at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts (the old stomping grounds of Martin Margiela and Dries Van Noten). He interned at John Galliano before starting his own label, which he sells in chic concept stores like Colette in Paris and 10 Corso Como in Milan.

As you might guess from his CV, there is a worldly romance about the guy. He speaks softly, and behind the swarthy moustache and John Lennon spectacles you sense a modern-day pirate sitting on a treasure trove of ideas. A lot of those ideas are solid gold, but he can appreciate gilt and gimcrack, too. There’s something to be learned from ostentation, especially in our Trumpian Mar-a-Lago present.

“I think it’s really interesting to have all this vulgarity today,” he says. “Everything provokes something, right? Perhaps all this ugliness is good! Perhaps everything that’s happening right now will help people concentrate on what beauty really is and to take that road more than ever.”

Not what you’d expect to hear from the man heading up an historically restrained house. Italian shoemaker Alessandro Berluti founded the company in Paris in 1895 based on the strength of a dramatically simple lace-up: crafted from a single piece of seamless leather, so minimally designed that it resembles a last more than a shoe. Since then, the label has claimed a distinguished list of highbrow customers, from Marcel Proust and the Duke of Windsor to JFK and Aristotle Onassis. But Ackermann was hired to be a fashion bomb-thrower, and he’s bringing a new kind of customer with him.

“We haven’t found the Berluti guy yet,” he says. “We’re still searching. We had the codes, we absorbed them, and then we threw them away.” Ackermann suggests the past Berluti man was too serious for his own good. It was time to loosen up.

“Look, the world outside is tough and that dude is working hard. He’s constantly on the road,” Ackermann says. “He’s a modern nomad. So he needs to have a very essential wardrobe. That’s the exercise for me — to make a wardrobe that’s very comfortable, easy.”

Taking over in the wake of Sartori, who successfully took Berluti from leather goods to ready-to-wear, was a tall order. So was focusing solely on menswear, an arena in which Ackermann admits he’s had limited experience. “I was coming from the women’s world and never considered myself to be a men’s designer in the first place,” he says. (He’s being modest: his personal brand has included menswear since 2010.) “When I got the call from Berluti, I was like, ‘Seriously?’”

Again, he undersells himself. Ackermann may not be a household name, but thanks to his eponymous line, he has plenty of fashion street cred. The Godfather himself, Karl Lagerfeld, once cited Ackermann as his heir apparent at Chanel, and he boasts a devoted following of stars including Usher, Kanye West and gender-bending actress Tilda Swinton, who counts the designer as a friend. In typical Swintonian prose, she calls his clothes: “supersonic medieval, sophisticated beyond pure simplicity, fluid beyond time or place. His clothes make you walk a grounded walk, face the wind, move comfortably. Eternal, deathless chic.”

West, for his part, alerted a generation of style-conscious hypebeasts to the designer by wearing his pieces, which were in turn dissected on websites like Complex and copied by fast-fashion retailers such as H&M. There was a period when West seemed to live in Ackermann’s high-end, low-slung sweatpants, inspired by the designer’s childhood in the desert.

“I was six or seven and we were living in Algeria,” he says, “and you had these pants called ‘Zouave’, which were low-cut trousers. I always wanted to have them but for some reason my parents said no. It always stuck in my mind, and the moment I started to do the men’s collection, there was this ‘now I can have it!’ feeling.”

At his autumn show in Paris earlier this year, his first for Berluti, those same low-hanging sweatpants were there again, just one part of a collection that did have some kid-in-a-sweetshop abandon. The colours (bottle green, chocolate and dove grey) were rich, and the fabrics (silk, suede and velvet) were even richer. But for all that sumptuous appeal, the clothes were easy to wear, as appropriate at the airport as they would be at a dinner party, with influences drawn from everywhere (and therefore nowhere).

That’s by design, Ackermann says. “All of us are nomadic nowadays. Look at how many people are travelling. They’re flying nonstop. They’re in cabs. And they’re travelling with their minds thanks to Instagram,” he says. “The world’s turning out to be one big rolling thing. There is no one place.”

Because of this rootlessness, Ackermann claims he’s most “at home” when travelling. “When you’re very far away from home, you’re actually closer to home,” he says. “You have the luxury to sit down and analyse things. It gives you peace of mind. It’s not me in India, inspired by a woman wearing a sari. It’s me in India struck by the calmness of being in a foreign place that allows my thoughts to come inside.”

When at home in Paris, Ackermann finds his inspiration at 3am, taking long walks through the city. “When I’m alone in the street, that’s when I have the most fantastic dreams about my work,” he says. “Nights are the most beautiful moments for this. These are the stolen moments we eventually sell.”

However dreamy Ackermann may seem, he’s not interested in creating clothes for some far-flung fantasy; he’s firmly rooted in the here and now. “We have a business to run here,” he says. “The Berluti guy’s down here with us. He’s totally in reality.” And he knows that reality can get messy. “I think on a personal level, you have to let failure and danger in,” he says. Get on the horse. Go wherever it takes you. “There’s always a crack somewhere you have to embrace, because that’s where the light shines through. Leonard Cohen said [something like] that. That’s why the search for beauty and ugliness has always intrigued me,” he says. “That’s the interesting part.”