Haider Ackermann follows his heart. It's brought him to some interesting places. Today he's in Paris, where he has lived and worked for the past eight years. That's the longest time he's spent anchored in one location—ever. “I'm not ready to move,” he tells me. We're walking along the busy Rue Saint-Honoré on a sunny summer day. “Unless…unless there is a new love affair—and then I'm out of here again.”

Ackermann's most recent love affair didn't take him away from Paris. If anything, it helped him create a deeper connection to the city. It lasted nearly two years—three seasons, in fashion-speak—and ended with a public breakup that, considering the tumultuous state of the industry in 2018, wasn't exactly surprising but was, for many people, hugely disappointing.

Ackermann says that after eight years, he has no plans to leave Paris. Unless, of course, he finds love elsewhere. “It makes me sound like a romantic fool, which is not the case.”

So how did he end up as creative director of Berluti in the first place?

“It was something which was unexpected,” he says. He'd had other offers. Margiela approached him at one point to take the reins. And there were women's designer brands knocking on his door. But Berluti, the 120-year-old French label best known for making exquisitely crafted leather shoes (the house had hardly any menswear offerings up until about 2012, when it launched its first-ever men's ready-to-wear collection), offered him something the others couldn't. And it wasn't just money. For Ackermann, a true romantic, it couldn't be. “If I had done things for financial reasons,” he says, “I would have accepted different things.” But with Berluti, “I was very intrigued and disturbed. And everything which intrigues and disturbs me always wakes up my curiosity.” So in the fall of 2016, he took the job and began his work.

Ackermann's three Berluti collections established a convincing new sartorial identity for the contemporary professional male of limitless financial means. “He was giving a modern touch to the classic luxury brand,” his friend the stylist and editor Robert Rabensteiner told me. “He was bringing a different silhouette to the luxury product.” The clothes were brazenly decadent—caramel lambskin trench coats, gold silk blazers, shimmering velvet suits, all cut with Ackermann's signature slouch—and confidently relaxed, but with a serious, unfussy manner to suit the price tag. “There was always this kind of madness in my world. This daydreamer,” Ackermann says. “And now I was anchored in reality. Business. It was a goal for me to show I can do different things and I can talk about this man who is standing straight in this reality.”

While he worked away on Berluti, Ackermann continued his eponymous label, which he began with a women's collection in 2003, followed by a men's in 2010. And so he became another one of fashion's multifaceted, creative businessmen, in the mold of Marc Jacobs at Louis Vuitton or Raf Simons at Calvin Klein, ambitiously juggling the high-profile corporate job with the self-built brand. And he was unfazed by the workload: “You know when you just had a new lover? You're so tired that you forget about being tired, you forget about everything, because you're just simply too excited. So yeah, it was a lot. But the excitement makes you forget.”

It was another love affair that, in the mid-'90s, brought Ackermann to Antwerp, Belgium, where he studied fashion design at the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He was asked to leave after three years. “I was not the most proper student,” he says, “due to my insecurities, because when you're insecure you don't want to share things. So I preferred to hide away, and I did everything on my terms.”

Ackermann was born in Colombia and was adopted as a baby by a white French family. He has a brother and a sister, also adopted, one from Korea, one from Vietnam. His father worked as a cartographer who traveled the world making maps, and the family went with him. They lived in the Netherlands and across Africa. “When I was younger, I didn't see any creativity in his work,” Ackermann said when I asked him about his father. “But obviously there is. We all try to find our way. We all escape ourselves. He traveled to so many countries. It's a way of escaping where he was coming from—from this little village in the north of France, in Alsace—to escape his youth. Whatever I do, it's a way to escape.”

Ackermann’s collections are maximal, but his Paris office is nearly empty. “I need peace,” he says. “I need a place to quiet down.”

“How many more sneakers can you have in the world?”

Living this way, observing people and cultures, from Algeria to the Sahara, made Ackermann sensitive to the movement of textiles and how people cover themselves. “It was always about women being hidden beneath fabric,” he says. “There was something mysterious. You never knew who the woman was underneath. And that mystery, I think, is why I'm now doing fashion, because I thought I would discover more about the woman than anything else.”