In the spring of 2015, Haider Ackermann staged a collection that bridged the present with an imagined elsewhere. The palette leaned toward the shades of bare skin and wilted petals—flesh tones, washed pastels, and the muted luminosity of soft silk—yet the atmosphere was charged with a quietly otherworldly energy. The runway’s most striking constant was the hair: forty identical “glacial” wigs, cut into punkish, uneven choir-boy crops by Eugene Souleiman, their silver tone achieved by colorist Josh Wood and a team who spent three days bleaching and toning each piece to an exact hue. On some brunette models, dark roots were deliberately visible, evoking the visual tension between growth and erasure.
Ackermann described the collection’s inspiration as “broken and damaged flowers,” and this sensibility permeated both fabric choice and construction. Jackets, blouses, and bombers carried the memory of traditional tailoring but were disrupted—ruffles spilling from the collar of a blazer, ruching tracing the zipper of a sweater. Familiar archetypes were gently distorted: a shrunken jacket sculpted from sweatshirt material; ruching and ruffles applied to knits that, in other hands, might remain casual, here becoming sharply composed.
These garments revealed their craft in their structure. Tulle-covered bomber jackets bore curly-edged ruching that softened their outline while maintaining architectural integrity. Layered peplums, cut with precision, fell like petals yet held their form, evidence of pattern drafting that balanced fragility with engineered poise. Chiffons and mousselines trailed from cuffs and necklines, their drape calculated to seem incidental, their slouch a product of control.
Ackermann’s approach was one of considered juxtaposition—knits where suiting was expected, tailoring where softness might have sufficed. Every seam, fold, and gather served both line and movement. The effect was cumulative: no single piece eclipsed another. Even the footwear, strappy heels with an added strap that altered the familiar line of the foot, participated in the collection’s quiet redefinition of the known.
In its whole, Spring/Summer 2015 stood as a study in distortion and restraint, where the worn and the delicate were not opposed but intertwined. Ackermann’s garments did not merely clothe the body; they suggested its transience, its strength, and its capacity for reinvention through the language of cut, fabric, and finish.
