By Gabriela Afanador
Tuesday 7, April 2026
Photo: firstVIEW
Haider Ackermann chose Place Vendôme for his third collection as Tom Ford’s creative director, and he chose to flood it with light. Where the previous season unfolded in blue twilight and carefully managed shadow, the Fall/Winter 2026 show placed everything inside a stark, blindingly illuminated white box that functioned not as a backdrop but as an instrument, clinical and unsparing, the kind of light that removes the possibility of flattering ambiguity and forces every garment to justify itself under forensic pressure. The reference Ackermann has cited for this transition is Dario Argento’s decision to shoot Tenebrae entirely in hyper-luminous daytime settings rather than the conventional darkness of horror, the thesis being that what is fully visible and fully controlled is more unsettling than what is hidden. Applied to a fashion house built on the premise of visible desire, it produces something genuinely interesting: a collection that is unquestionably seductive and entirely unwilling to perform that seduction in the ways the house has historically performed it.
The conceptual shift Ackermann has been engineering at Tom Ford since his appointment is the replacement of the house’s original porno-chic directness with something he seems more interested in, the psychology of restraint, power expressed through precision and withholding rather than through exposure. The cultural references that informed this collection move between the chillingly immaculate corporate wardrobe of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, the effortless clean-lined American minimalism of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and the cold fatal protagonists of films like Tony Scott’s The Hunger and Harry Kümel’s Daughters of Darkness, figures whose danger is proportional to the control they exercise over their own surfaces. The result is a wardrobe built for a woman who understands that the most powerful erotic statement available to her is the one she chooses not to make, and that understanding is sewn into the construction of every piece in the collection.
The Tailoring and the Opening
The collection opened with a white wool set, a sharply scalloped tailored jacket paired with a midi skirt, and the model carried a single black leather glove while her other hand remained bare. It was the collection’s first and most economical statement: that asymmetry, the deliberate withholding of the obvious second half of anything, is the governing logic of everything that follows. The pinstripe suiting that arrived in the first third of the show demonstrated Ackermann’s command of proportion-driven tailoring with a clarity that rewards the kind of close attention the harsh lighting demanded, slim-cut with strong shoulders and trouser hems that pooled barely at the calf, the silhouettes channeling the chillingly immaculate exteriors of late-1980s corporate dressing without the ironic distance that reference usually requires.
The most structurally inventive tailoring detail in the collection was the asymmetric waistband, low-slung charcoal wool trousers cut with a diagonal dipping waistline held in place by a single thin leather strap threaded through only one belt loop, the waist dropping on one side to expose the iliac furrow in a way that reads less as deliberate exposure than as a very controlled accident. It is an extremely specific erogenous logic, the kind that requires genuine precision to pull off without tipping into mere provocation, and the fact that it works in the context of impeccably constructed suiting rather than against it is what gives it its charge. A second tailoring subversion appeared in slim leather trousers detailed with loose silver-hardware lacing running the full length of the side seam, introducing a fetishistic material reference that the collection’s overall restraint transforms from statement into texture.
The clear PVC trench coats and vinyl pieces constitute the collection’s most conceptually loaded garments and its most practically resolved ones simultaneously. Constructed in rigid medical-grade transparent sheets with dark leather and croc-embossed trim, they function as protective armor that leaves everything beneath fully visible, five-figure cashmere coats and structured suits worn inside them remaining entirely legible while the wearer is shielded from the elements. The reference to the transparent raincoat in American Psycho is explicit and acknowledged, but Ackermann resolves what could be a conceptual gimmick into genuine utility, and the result is outerwear that is both deeply strange and entirely wearable, which is precisely the kind of productive contradiction the collection was built to generate.
Fabric, Color, and the Evening
The material dialogue running through the collection pairs clinical synthetic surfaces with soft, cocooning natural fibers in combinations that make the friction between them visible rather than resolved. Heavy matte black cashmere sweaters appear over transparent PVC pencil skirts, the dense warmth of the knit sitting directly against the cold synthetic sheen beneath it. Sheer A-line skirts in film-weight tulle and point d’esprit lace float under razor-sharp suit jackets, the lace borders visible below the hem and the legs in delicate stockings beneath. A particularly virtuosic hybrid coat transitions from structured tailored wool at the upper body to leather at the waist down, matching the leather skirt worn beneath it, so that the coat and the skirt read as a single material logic interrupted by the seam where they meet.
The denim represents a genuine new development for the house under Ackermann’s direction, slouchy straight-leg and cigarette-cut pieces styled with minimal deliberation, a plain black shirt, a simple baby tee, allowing the quality of the cut to speak without assistance. Several looks featured a seasoned grey-haired model in a traditional houndstooth checked suit with slicked-back styling, the casting decision communicating something quietly emphatic about what kind of woman this wardrobe is actually for and refusing the youth-centric runway convention with the same matter-of-fact confidence that characterizes the clothes themselves.
The chromatic strategy of the collection places a strict black and white and deep charcoal foundation against moments of very precisely deployed color that the scarcity of their appearances makes almost physically arresting. A cerulean blue appears on shirt collars beneath voluminous animal-print coats in a pop of visual energy that functions almost as an irreverent wink against the collection’s disciplined severity. Saturated grass green arrives in knitted sets. Blood-red suede accents and crimson lips appear against the clinical white of the showspace with the high-contrast force of Guy Bourdin photography, warm tobacco and cognac in the croc-embossed leather pieces add tactile depth, and powder blue and blush pink business shirting nod to late-1980s corporate dressing with enough contemporary distance to avoid nostalgia.
The show closed with a series of white formal jackets and unbuttoned vests worn over bare chests with the asymmetric low-slung trousers, followed by two black evening gowns with fluted chiffon edges and a cropped tuxedo jacket with a beaded sash, the evening register arriving at the end with the controlled inevitability of a conclusion that has been building since the opening look. The beauty, led by Tom Ford’s global makeup artist Lucy Bridge, kept to the collection’s architectural logic: sculpted cheekbones under the stark runway lights, wet-look smoky eyes with a sheen that caught the clinical brightness, velvet-matte lips in either scarlet rouge or a rosy-brown nude, and hair slicked back to remove anything that might soften the precision of the face. Several opening models wore bleach-blonde buzz cuts that read not as provocation but as logical completion of the collection’s argument, that what is stripped down to its essential geometry is the most powerful thing in the room.