Fashion’s finest bromance by far burns between Timothée Chalamet and Haider Ackermann. At Ackermann’s show this morning, Chalamet rolled up with a refreshing lack of pomp and circumstance. With his Prada Re-Nylon backpack slung over a plain white T-shirt worn above tapered paneled jeans, he resembled a well-put-together French exchange student. He clapped like crazy at the finale, then threw the “I Love You” hand gesture when posing with Ackermann backstage after it. Aww. Chalamet was as chill as his effect on the audience was electrifying: Ladies, you’re objectifying! Either get a room or get a restraining order!
Chalamet-generated vapors apart, what this show delivered was Haider Ackermann at arguably his highest creative watermark so far. Although there was no real explanation forthcoming afterward (“I don’t like to define,” said the designer), the keys to unlocking the thought behind the collection appeared to reside in the track list upon the cotton quilt coat in Look 25. Under Ackermann’s signature and the headline “Private Dancer” (but above his name written in Japanese) was a list of songs, including Leonard Cohen’s “I’m Your Man,” David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners,” Yoko Ono’s “I Want My Love to Rest Tonight,” Underworld’s “Born Slippy,” Eminem’s “Lose Yourself,” Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” and a Bonnie Prince Billy song that was unreadable thanks to the fold of the coat. “These are all my favorite songs,” said Ackermann. “It was just an ode to everything I love.”
The collection was also a mix that unfolded in groups of looks for both women (sometimes under space-age beehive hats) and men. A blank-slate white group bled into tailored day fabrics (camel, olive), before a velvet quilted aside led an extended monochrome section whose cutout, mixed-up collar shapes seemed to hint at the orchestrally formal. These angled duets of black and white fractured at the last into a triangular check. “You just put people together and let them get on the catwalk,” said Ackermann.
What united this diverse group was the Ackermann eye for the romantic, the vagabond, and the sensual. At the back of jackets, vents bled into extra folds of material that caressed the silhouette. Long and lean overcoats were contoured with collars and buttons in a series of masterfully produced arrangements. Pants for women and men, tended with rare exception to the skinny, were often backed in leather, sometimes with grosgrain side stripes too, and consistently unisex-y. In what was a first for this observer, Ackermann included corduroy within his menswear and matched his closing triangle-check foreshortened frock coat with a pair of velvet track pants. The front of one white T-shirt read Look at me: Shirting and tailoring were emblazoned with block-cap quotes from Dorothy Parker that included “But I shall stay the way I am because I do not give a damn” and “And if you do not love me so, to hell, my love, with you.”
This show was a painstakingly tailored mixtape of all of Ackermann’s wearable passions that was both a love letter to his fans and an explicit, beautifully cut cold shoulder to any tasteless agnostics. On the way out, a grande dame of letters who had not been at all shaken by Chalamet exclaimed of Ackermann with unprompted passion: “They should just give him Armani.”