One evening in late January, Haider Ackermann, the new designer at Tom Ford, was tucked into a velvet banquette at La Reserve, the discreet, tryst-worthy hotel not far from the Élysée Palace in Paris. He was doing his best impression of Tom Ford, the man.
“Hello, Haider,” Mr. Ackermann purred, his voice dropping an octave and taking on a sultry tone. He was acting out a phone call he had received. “It’s Tom.” He paused to take a breath, as if he were tasting the air. “Call me,” he said, making it sound like “come here.”
Then, his voice back to normal, he added, “Of course I did.”
That was about eight months ago. It turned out Mr. Ford, who had sold the company that bears his name to Estée Lauder in 2022, had a proposition for Mr. Ackermann. After only a year, the new owners — Lauder and Ermenegildo Zegna — had decided that Mr. Ford’s immediate successor, Peter Hawkings, was not the right man for the brand.
To replace him, they had only one name on their list, “and that name was me,” Mr. Ackermann said. Though he had recently taken a job as creative director of the outdoor company Canada Goose and was in the midst of negotiations to become the designer of a big French fashion house, Mr. Ackermann started fantasizing about Tom Ford.
“I was immediately thinking about what I should do,” he said. “What I would do.”
Now, after multiple conversations with Mr. Ford, Mr. Ackermann is on the verge of introducing a new Tom Ford collection for men and women. The goal is to do what Mr. Hawkings could not and redefine Tom Ford for the post-Tom Ford era.
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