Haider Ackermann: Fall-Winter 2011-12. a thousand kisses deep...

Haider Ackermann:  Fall-Winter 2011-12
March 05, 2011. - 10:30 am.

To step away and be absent and to lose yourself completely and to really come back and  find yourself again—
that’s something quite rare –Haider Ackermann for Interview Magazine, February 2011.

 

  

  

  

Haider Ackermann is the man.  Fashion’s latest design darling has in the last two show seasons demonstrated a technician’s hand, sensuously entrenched in a philosophical celebration of life and time.  He is the new adamant voice of seduction, revealing himself finally from the shadows of a nine year-long fashion veil.  No longer an industry best-kept secret, Ackermann’s formidable ready-to-wear collections have unearthed a new mode of dressing that makes the wearer desirous and more than self-aware of that desire.  His work is of the sartorial type that suspends the individual into an experience of a past space.  There, one loses himself completely in the task of trying to access the form through a cycle of withdrawing and self-exposing.  This is the Ackermann oeuvre.  The garments themselves are often steeped in a paradoxical exercise of sorts where one minute an exanimate leather vest comes to life sitting atop a pair of languid, imperial pajamas.  Spring-Summer 2011 was nothing short of an opus dedicated to dressing-to-undress, where exoskeletons of leather armor incubated the broodingly beautiful women underneath.  It spoke of a complex schism (a disquieting bohemia, perhaps?) and made front-row attendants weep for its charismatic beauty.  But if one thing is true of Haider, as essayist and photographer Erik Madigan Heck has written, is the existence of a resilient protean dynamic in his body of work.  So if last season’s show concept was about the integrity found within ease and self-aware sensuality, it was time to move forward in Fall-Winter 2011-12 to celebrate a definite, unambiguous romance.  What’s nice about Fall-Winter 2011-12 is that it wasn’t decorative but offered the necessary elements of protection expected for fall-winter—not to say that it translated a thoroughly hard execution.  Its cocooning moments were revealed when Haicker’s signature sculpted outerwear appeared more soigné than commercially sportif.  Slouchy and fluid with a high resolution sheen offered in cobalt blue and plum, it retained the dishabille silhouette of last spring but with waists cinched with thickly padded belts.  Transcending the body and recapturing the soul are hard to achieve but Ackermann has yet again proven they are feats easily accessed through his entrancing vision.  If his woman has in the past been lost in herself and in her journey to understand her positionality in the world she inhabits, dare we say she has been found.  And that’s something quite rare.