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PARIS, France — Against a huge, blank white screen, Haider Ackermann's models walked with heads uniformly wrapped in brutally short, spiky wigs. Hairstylist Duffy compared the hair to iron filings under the influence of a magnet. It was a starkly dramatic detail. Ackermann said he intended the screen and the wigs to focus the audience's attention on the clothes. But they were also a perfect complement to a collection which pared the designer's aesthetic to a core of razor-sharp tailoring and second-skin knits. As Johann Johannsson's music for "Arrival" swelled on the soundtrack, it was hard not to see Ackermann's women as a different kind of alien visitation, perfect creatures who were not of this world. He delivered an uncompromising fantasy in black and white and red, and electricity sizzled in the room. Most electrifying? The hyper-tailored gold pieces, the fabric cracked, perfection perversely sullied. Maybe it's Ackermann's work on men's tailoring at Berluti which has bestowed on him a new appreciation of the human form. Kudos to that, because he's telling striking new stories.
