The Forms: Haider Ackermann Spring-Summer 2012-13.

THE FORMS

Haider Ackermann

Spring-Summer 2012-13

Women's Ready-to-Wear

Oct. 1st, 2011 - 10:30 am Palais Omnisports Paris Bercy.

[ Fall-Winter 2011-12 collection by Phil Poynter for

German Vogue, October-2011, featuring Iris Strubegger/Women ]

It should come as no surprise that even more than before, the critics of Haider Ackermann believe him to be a dreamer - a poet - a lover - a provocateur.  And a much needed one.  After a series of ineffectively hype-laden, derivative showings in Paris this week (with the exceptions of the true old-school masters:  Thimister, Ghesquiere, Demeulemeester, Hussein, and Owens), needless to say I was in need of Haider’s admirable segacity and sensualist re-configuration of hallmark archetypal garments that have come to singlehandedly represent the Ackermann oeuvre.  His work has been remarked as transporting - an assertion apparent in Ackermann’s flowingly airy volumes of fabric that slouch across, drape, hide, and expose.  The contextualization of Haider’s work as ‘transporting’ isn’t just fluffy, cue-card fashion jargon -- it is verifiable and objectively witnessed in Haider’s conception of time and hieratic discourse.  Let me explain...

It was apparent to me twice over the course of the year: first during the finale look of his Spring-Summer 2011 collection where Elvis’s Love Me Tender slowly dissipated over the sound-system into a jarring, rhythmic industrial booming, and secondly during his Fall-Winter 2011-12 collection; during which Leonard Cohen’s hauntingly majestic recitation of A Thousand Kisses Deep abducted our senses and lullabied his audience into soporific wonderment.  There was just something unmistakably suspending about Martyna Budna’s slow pace from the end of the runway to backstage - she seemed to float as Elvis belted out ....”for my darling, I love you - and I always will.”  At that moment I was certain Haider was making a promise - to us, to his woman, and above all else to himself.  The same goes for the finale look of Fall-Winter 2011-12 when Daiane Conterato appeared to diffuse down the carpeted show space in liquid, creme-hued sinuous metallics adjacent to Cohen’s ‘....but you don’t need to hear me now, and every word I speak.  ....it counts against me anyhow.’  Ending with heavy-handed propositions concerning love and life’s certain vicissitudes is what makes the Ackermann patois dynamic and believable - at the end of a 15-minute showing, you’re left with the highly rudimentary acknowledgement that what Haider creates and communicates to us is real life - real emotions.  What followed was a slew of the usual - the type of rhetoric that celebrated Ackermann’s mysterious oeuvre, metaphorical hoo-hah proclamations that Ackermann’s woman was drawing closer and closer into revelation, and downright acclaim over the drapery and folding techniques one could only attribute to the type of surrealist romantic that Ackermann undeniably is.  ShowStudio.com’s creative director Alexander Fury even went so far as to maintain that Ackermann had achieved in a single show season ‘the fashion moment mythologized’ - the type of momentary ossification triumphed in a brief, though powerful storyline of unearthing truths and conquering even more elusive notions of self.  [I recall the finale of Tom Ford’s F/W 2003-04 Gucci collection and the finale of the late Lee McQueen’s No.13 show for S/S 1999 as worthy of such a title - though Haider’s show space for F/W 2011-12 will go down in history as one of the most charging, atmospheric experiences fashion has seen in a long while.]   ‘It was nothing short of perfection,’ Fury enthusiastically admitted in his audio report last February.  

While reiterating what he’s always done best, Haider elicited the most visceral of emotions and achieved the metaphorical wizardry of freezing us in time - incubating us in his love, and bringing us to tears.  That’s not to say he isn’t a protean artist - the man himself has shaped and reconstituted silhouettes (steeped in grainy sublimation), made them diagonal, circumscribed, and supinated - all in one outfit.  Making aerodynamic fabrics articulate themselves in a fluid, loose way while procuring their subtextual multi-variables is, for lack of better words, brilliant.  But Fury’s perspective cannot go overlooked - Ackermann did in fact achieve the elusive notion of the perfect fashion moment somewhere heartbreakingly frozen in time between Leonard Cohen’s so-called mirrored twin and next of kin.  The Telegraph’s Hilary Alexander was quick to ask Haider himself if it was his intention to speak from his past life - his endowed experience across multiple worlds - and the cross-cultural macro-identities that the designer himself represents.  While those things, he assured her, are at the back of his mind - he never builds a structure from a specific set of images but rather from their intangible ideas and lacunae they soak themselves in - his own memories.  Though Fall-Winter 2011-12 (I call it ‘A Thousand Retail Cha-Ching Sounds Deep’ with vendors like Barney’s, Bergdorf-Goodman, Luis-Aviaroma, and Saks clamoring for the collection’s statement pieces) was a galvinizing moment in Haider’s decade-long repertoire that introduced new structures, today’s collection for S/S 2012-13 sought to resurrect Ackermann oldies-but-goodies in a self-referential exercise in re-orienting hypnotic maison attributes - (think his Spring-Summer 2010 collection with its soigne, though rigidly attenuated idea of a silhouette).  

This time around Ackermann again proved heroic - not in the literary notion of romantically victorious but in his prolonging of his woman into brighter, more resolute understandings  The collection at times showed yet again Haider’s ontologist side - his need to speak from fashion’s epistemic place and reveal (or try to, at least...) fashion’s primordial voice.  A check-mark in his overstuffed bag of successes, Spring-Summer 2012-13 acted more as sartorial and brand-identity buffer as opposed to propelling into new territory with a lateral move in silhouette.   Transparent veiling, silk trains, leather vests cinched at the waist, and kimono-esque bathrobes are nothing extraordinarily ground-breaking for Haider - but they exploded with prismatic, engrossingly pungent hues - kaleidoscopic but coherently coalesced.  I’ve said before that the inherent power that Haider’s clothes harness and command somewhat defies the written explanation of their purpose - and that Haider truly transcends any on-paper assessment of his body of work, making my words, in a sense - pointless.  Being limited in your verbal and written articulation of how perfectly aerial (from inside and out) something is, I will admit, is quite a burden.  But if I were asked what fashion’s default Platonic form looked like, I’d hastily maintain it would resemble a slouchy, draping Haider Ackermann imperial evening gown (this time in high-resolution, high sheen metallic variations) - spliced with all the broodingly necessary and expected moments of skin-flash and mystery.  Achieving that type of perfection is rare, but Ackermann (who for all practical purposes is arguably the sartorial demi-urge of the post-modern couturiers of our time) has proved yet again it is a feat accessible through his synchronous, thoroughly defectless vision of the world that he inhabits and ultimately seduces us with.  How lucky we are to be a part of it.

- Matthew X. Callahan