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PARIS, France — "We're living in a strange world," said Haider Ackermann. "We all want to belong to a gang, because you have to fight." His girl gang was like a female equivalent of William Burroughs' Wild Boys — or at least the way they looked in the Duran Duran video they inspired, stalking through a cloud of dry ice in their multi-coloured Mohawks and low-slung leather pants.
Mica Arganaraz previewed the look in Ackermann's men's collection in June. Here, she closed the show in a black leather jacket, graffiti-ed with a big H, over a slithery, lace-trimmed lilac satin slip dress. Between Mica's masculine/feminine dynamic, Ackermann's show took shape. Slip dresses vs silk dressing gowns, waistcoats over bare chests vs sheer blouses and distressed ruffles — riverboat gambler vs dancehall hostess. Chartreuse satin pants under a military coat amplified that ripple of sexual tension.
Maybe it was the gang cue, but Ackermann’s women looked like lean, mean gunslingers. Who knows if he ever saw Johnny Guitar, with Joan Crawford and Mercedes McCambridge duelling it out (that was almost Burroughs again, with the gay gunfighter in his 1983 novel The Place of Dead Roads) but the very idea was enough to add the edge of transgression that Ackermann is drawn to.
