The fitting room at Tom Ford's Madison Avenue flagship is smaller than you'd expect

The fitting room at Tom Ford's Madison Avenue flagship is smaller than you'd expect. Haider Ackermann stands in the centre, one hand adjusting the lapel of a double-breasted jacket in midnight wool, the other holding a pin cushion he doesn't use. He watches the tailor work, silent. The jacket is for spring 2026, his second collection since assuming the creative directorship in October 2023, and the room smells faintly of steam and bergamot. Someone asks if the shoulder needs dropping. Ackermann shakes his head once. "It sits where it should."

This is the man Tom Ford himself chose to succeed him — a curious selection on paper. Ackermann, fifty-three, built his reputation on fluid, almost mournful tailoring: draped trousers, asymmetric closures, a palette that leaned towards charcoal and rust. Ford's universe, by contrast, was lacquered, carnal, unapologetically commercial. One made clothes for people who wanted to disappear into elegance; the other dressed people who wanted to be seen across a room. The appointment raised eyebrows. It still does.

Formation

Ackermann was born in Bogotá in 1971 and raised in the Netherlands and Belgium, a geography that shows up in his work as a certain rootlessness, a refusal to settle into one aesthetic camp. He studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in the early nineties, part of the generation that came after the Six but shared their rigour. His thesis collection, shown in 1998, featured trousers cut on the bias and jackets with sleeves that seemed to spiral from the armscye. It was technically accomplished and commercially unviable, which is to say it was exactly what one expected from Antwerp at the time.

He spent the next several years in that familiar purgatory: freelance consulting, a brief stint at Bernhard Willhelm's studio, his own label launched in 2001 with backing he could not sustain. The clothes were beautiful. They did not sell. By 2003, he was showing in Paris on a shoestring, dressing Tilda Swinton and approximately seven other people who understood what he was doing. The industry respected him. It did not make him rich.

The turn

What changed, arguably, was his willingness to meet commerce halfway without capitulating entirely. In 2016, Ackermann was appointed creative director at Berluti, the LVMH-owned leather house that had recently pivoted into ready-to-wear. It was not an obvious fit. Berluti's heritage was Venetian patina and burnished oxfords; Ackermann's language was drape and shadow. But he found a seam to work: he kept the house's emphasis on hand-finished leather and layered it with his own vocabulary of fluid suiting and unexpected colour. A rust-coloured leather trench over wide-leg trousers in tobacco wool. A double-breasted coat in oxblood with sleeves that pooled at the wrist. It was Berluti, but refracted through someone who understood that elegance could be melancholic.

He lasted three years. The reviews were warm; the sales were not. LVMH parted ways with him in 2019, and Ackermann returned to his own label, which he had kept alive in skeletal form. The Berluti chapter is often framed as a failure, but it taught him something useful: how to operate inside a house structure, how to negotiate between archival codes and personal vision, how to deliver a collection on someone else's schedule. These are not skills one learns in Antwerp.

The signature

If there is a through-line in Ackermann's two-decade body of work, it is this: he makes clothes for the body in motion, not the body on display. His jackets move when you walk. His trousers pool and drape rather than cling. He works almost exclusively in natural fibres — wool, silk, linen, leather — and he prefers them slightly undyed or overdyed, so the hand remains visible. A jacket might be lined in raw silk that catches the light differently than the outer shell. A pair of trousers might have a waistband finished with a single row of saddle stitching, the kind of detail you notice only when dressing.

Colour, for Ackermann, is never decorative. He uses it the way a painter uses underpainting: to create depth, to suggest mood. A rust that reads as brown in certain light. A grey that leans towards lavender at the seams. He has spoken, in past interviews with System and AnOther, about growing up between languages and landscapes, and how that shaped his sense of in-betweenness. The clothes reflect that. They are not quite masculine, not quite feminine, not quite formal, not quite casual. They occupy a space that is harder to name and, for some clients, harder to wear.

The Ford chapter

When Tom Ford stepped down as creative director of his eponymous label in 2023 — following the brand's acquisition by Estée Lauder Companies for $2.8 billion the previous year — the question was not whether the house would continue, but how. Ford had been the house. His aesthetic was so singular, so tied to his biography and his gaze, that replacing him felt less like a succession than a reinvention.

Ackermann's first collection, shown in February 2024, was cautious. He kept Ford's emphasis on sharp tailoring and overt sensuality but softened the edges. Jackets still nipped at the waist, but the shoulders dropped slightly. Trousers still sat low on the hip, but the leg widened through the hem. The colour palette shifted from Ford's signature black and jewel tones toward Ackermann's preferred rust, charcoal, and a particular shade of deep plum that appeared in both a silk shirt and a leather bomber. The reviews were mixed. Some praised the restraint; others wondered if he was being too polite.

His second collection, for spring 2026, suggests he is finding his footing. The silhouette is more assertive: broader shoulders, longer jackets, trousers that break once at the ankle. He has introduced more texture — a blazer in slubbed linen, a leather trench with a matte finish that resists the high shine Ford favoured. There is still sex in the clothes, but it is less overt, more insinuated. A shirt unbuttoned to the sternum. A trouser waistband that sits just low enough to suggest what lies beneath. It is not Ford's version of desire, but it is desire nonetheless.

What comes next

The challenge, one suspects, is not whether Ackermann can design for Tom Ford — he can — but whether the Tom Ford client will follow him. The house built its business on a very specific fantasy: wealth, power, and the kind of beauty that announces itself. Ackermann's vocabulary is more ambiguous, more interior. It asks the wearer to do more work.

There are signs of adaptation. The spring 2026 collection includes several pieces that feel like direct translations of Ford codes into Ackermann grammar: a black leather blazer with a single button and a shawl collar, a white silk shirt cut to drape rather than cling, a pair of trousers in midnight wool with a subtle flare. These are not pastiche. They are negotiations.

Whether this works commercially remains to be seen. The house does not release sales figures, and Estée Lauder's quarterly reports lump Tom Ford into a broader 'luxury' category. But the Madison Avenue flagship is still lit, the appointments are still booked, and Ackermann is still standing in that fitting room, adjusting a lapel that does not need adjusting, watching a tailor work.

In the end, succession is less about replication than translation. Ford made clothes for people who wanted to be seen. Ackermann makes clothes for people who want to be understood. The question is whether those are the same people.