Paris, September 30, 2026. Place Vendôme becomes a theatre of reflections, and the new Tom Ford chooses the mirror as a metaphor for its evolving identity. Here, amid mirrored surfaces and silhouettes that seem to appear and disappear within the same instant, Haider Ackermann presents the maison’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection: a collection that does not attempt to replicate Tom Ford’s language, but instead asks what remains so unmistakably contemporary about it.
The answer is desire. Not the polished, predictable kind of glamour, but a more ambiguous, physical, almost cinematic form of seduction. The body becomes the centre of the narrative and clothing its instrument of tension: concealing, revealing, restraining, liberating. It is a collection built on the delicate boundary between control and surrender, between sartorial discipline and instinct.
Tailoring remains at the heart of the maison, yet loses the rigidity of a uniform to become something far more sensual. Sharp blazers, pinstriped suits and structured jackets are worn directly against the skin, revealing flashes of lingerie, bras and briefs. Masculine codes are detached from their original function and transferred onto the female body, while the male wardrobe is softened by a new sense of fluidity. The boundaries between the two worlds dissolve without ever needing to be announced: they simply unfold through proportion, material and the way garments inhabit the body.
Leather is one of the collection’s defining protagonists. Black, glossy and close to the skin, it appears across trench coats, skirts, jackets and suits, while delicate straps and bondage-inspired details introduce an openly erotic vocabulary. Yet provocation is never an end in itself. Instead, it becomes a reflection on power, image-making and the ability of clothing to transform the body. Ackermann’s sensuality does not need to raise its voice. It reveals itself through details, cuts, a bare shoulder, a defined waist, the tension of a garment following the contours of the skin.
Then comes red, intense and theatrical, almost like a flame burning through the darkness. Alongside it, black, white, cream, brown, blue and military green create a palette that moves between night and day. Because this Tom Ford does not exist solely within the fantasy of evening. Low-rise denim, utility jackets, jumpsuits and more relaxed pieces enter the collection’s vocabulary, bringing it closer to the city without sacrificing the glamour and tension that have long defined the house.
And yet the atmosphere remains deeply cinematic. There is something nocturnal, decadent and sensual in the show’s imagery, an echo of that Eighties cinema in which desire always carried a darker side. References to Tony Scott’s The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie and Susan Sarandon, emerge through pale beauty, slicked-back hair, heavily defined eyes and the idea of a femininity that refuses to reassure. It is a beauty that feels almost vampiric: sophisticated, unsettling and intensely seductive, turning the runway into a cinematic scene.
Then comes the finale: black swimwear, sculpted close to the body and punctuated by cut-outs revealing the waist, hips and abdomen. After the construction of the garment comes the skin. After tailoring, the body. It is as though the entire collection has been moving towards this moment, progressively stripping itself back until only the essential remains.
This is where Ackermann’s vision finds its clearest expression. He does not seem interested in preserving Tom Ford as an untouchable image, nor in erasing its past. Instead, he works with its deepest obsession: the idea that fashion can alter the way we perceive ourselves and, above all, the way we want to be perceived by others.
Before the mirrors of Place Vendôme, then, it is not simply a new collection that walks the runway. It is an identity in transformation. Haider Ackermann’s Tom Ford is darker, more ambiguous, less predictable. Yet it retains the tension between elegance and desire that has always made the house unmistakable.
A mirror, after all, does not simply reproduce the past. It multiplies it, distorts it, makes it new.
And within that multiplication, for Spring/Summer 2027, Tom Ford finds its reflection again.
