Haider Ackermann’s talent for conjuring atmosphere in fashion is so powerful that he once held a menswear collection in almost total darkness, explaining that he wanted us to “smell the clothes.” The result was pretty much universally adoring industry applause. Over a decade later at Tom Ford, the designer’s presentation format for commercially essential pre-collections is similarly counter-intuitive: you can neither see the designs nor speak to the designer.

Yet even in the absence of any direct contact, Ackermann’s fashion pheromones remain so oomphy that you can still “smell the clothes,” and the aromatic atmosphere of character they evoke, through only lookbooks and attributed quotes. Sensual, soulful and severe, his womenswear “creatures” (his term) come clad in an intensely fashioned skin of silhouette, texture, and color. A plastic raincoat paneled in brown leather revealed the finance bro architecture of the pinstripe beneath it. A camel coat with rolled shoulders was fitted over more double-breasted suiting and teamed with assassin’s gloves. Several all-leather looks based around caban or moto styles were assembled to be worn with nothing but denier between them and the skin of the creature in them. Fitted midi-dresses in what looked like lavender silk or mustard wool were cut and placed to accentuate the contours of the hip. What looked like Ackermann’s take on Erewhon yoga pant convention in a pailette spangled legging and a black knit rugby shirt worn with loafers was highly enjoyable. (Those loafers came as slides with what seemed to be an abundantly oversized shearling.)

Across to menswear the protagonist descriptor was “voyageur” and there was plenty of traveling back to the womenswear via birdseye suiting, sensually fitted leathers, painstakingly washed denim, and decorative undercollars styled with a pop to frame brooding facial expression. You could sniff the “whiff of British uptightness” Ackermann was quoted as wanting in this lookbook, spritzed with re-engineered Prince of Wales check suiting. Elsewhere the robe coats, cravat-matched double-breasteds, and oat-toned jersey leisurewear were more fragrantly Como-adjacent playboy perdigiorno. Both gender-sections of this collection shared multiple aspects—the jewel-tones, the footwear, the slender sexuality—that gently reformulated contemporary fashion’s most evocative equivalent of Proust’s madeleine: Tom Ford’s Gucci. This seemed a perfectly authentic way to homage this house’s source code and fire the desire of its contemporary fashion customers.