In 1775, the year after Louis XVI came to the French throne alongside his wife Marie-Antoinette, the Monnaie de Paris on the left bank of the Seine was completed. This exquisite neoclassical building’s sole purpose was to make money. It contained the foundries within which the realm’s coins were minted. Just 18 years later, both Louis and his wife (nicknamed Madame Déficit for her crippling extravagance) fell under revolution’s guillotine, marking the end of over a millennium’s worth of continuous royal rule in France and the dawn of liberté, egalité, and fraternité.
Empires rise and empires fall—but money is money. This evening, Berluti, the only all-male label in the stable of France’s current golden dynasty of LVMH-owned fashion brands, made its own small mark on the long history of the Monnaie by showing Haider Ackermann’s second collection for the brand there.
Not unlike the building in which we were so privileged to sit, Berluti is both beautiful and about money. Its shoes and clothes are intended to be the ne plus ultra of luxury masculine attire, and they are priced accordingly. In Paris, only Hermès competes. This presents Ackermann, a designer with a seriously particular signature aesthetic of his own, with an interesting challenge: to anticipate the desires of a constituency whose baseline attribute is serious wealth. Afterward backstage, he was hesitant to agree with the suggestion that this was a heavily Haider collection, saying, “I would not like this to be my own show. I am at the service of the house of Berluti.”
You could, however, see a lot of Haider in this collection. And that was no bad thing. The narrow cut of his pants hemmed above his lizard-skin or calfskin chisel-toe, stack-heel boots: very Haider. The turned-back and pulled-up sleeve of a pale yellow leather bomber: very Haider. The slightly sickly decadence of a gold silk double-breasted blazer and trousers, whose leg line was allowed to crumple: very Haider. The throbbing oomp-oomp-oomp soundtrack and the photographer-riling way in which the models marched in no apparent order in and out of the courtyard: both also very Haider.
Additionally very Haider was the addition of female looks to this aforementioned only all-masculine LVMH label. “Well, it’s always amusing to have women around. And they all borrow men’s clothes. It’s a healthy thing, a sexy thing.” Both in black leather trenches, black knit tops, and white jeans, the appearance of Stella Tennant alongside an Eddie Redmayne-ish male model, who was either a relative or an inspired piece of doppelgänger casting, proved his point.
But those Haider-ish flourishes were mostly styling. If you looked under that icing and into the cake—let them eat it—there were a lot of options for Berluti customers of more conventional tastes to digest. In a way this was more of a democratic collection (price apart) than anything we have ever seen from Berluti.
A white denim jacket and white slim-fit jeans over a soft V-neck knit was lustrous but non-demonstratively luxurious. Fernando’s closing black tailored coat, pant, and knit similarly so. There were track pants—proper track pants—in light blue with white stripes at the side. Yes, they were knitted, and yes, they were teamed with a black leather blazer and black chisel-toe boots, but in isolation they were totally accessible garments for a man with money to spend without feeling like a fashion radical. A gray silk bomber worn above a cavalry flashed light blue pant tellingly called the “Haider” was a similar piece, as were the polos with ribbed striped sleeves and the cashmere blazers.
“I wanted to have something very effortless,” said Ackermann. “Very, very easy; quiet, silent . . . very effortless, and not too precious.” By the standards of currency, this collection was doubtless very precious indeed. But the Berluti coin minted by Ackermann at the Monnaie tonight had the appearance if not of thrift, then of an appealing form of temperance. It did not scream Monsieur Déficit. These were clothes for a Berluti man who plans to keep his pants on should the sans-culottes come knocking.
