Inside Canada Goose’s High-Fashion Migration

While designing his first collection for Canada Goose, the designer Haider Ackermann stumbled upon an image in the brand’s archives that stopped him dead in his tracks. It was a photograph of the Canadian climber Laurie Skreslet, who scaled Mount Everest in the 1980s while wearing a fluorescent pink parka. “It is so beautiful,” Ackermann says. “The story goes that Canada Goose was supposed to make a coat for him, so he asked his daughter, who was around five, ‘What color should it be?’ She said pink.”

There’s a direct homage to that piece in the debut capsule from Snow Goose—Ackermann’s new “heritage” sub-label for the Toronto-based outerwear specialists—a lightweight pink shell jacket, albeit rendered in slightly paler shade. In fact, there’s a surprising splash of vibrant colors throughout the line: pastel purple, electric blue, chartreuse, lemon yellow, emerald green, mocha brown. “You go into those archives, and there’s so much energy there, so much color,” Ackermann says. “It’s electrifying.”

Courtesy of Canada Goose

When it was announced in May that Ackermann would become Canada Goose’s first-ever creative director, it caught the fashion world by surprise. Through his celebrated namesake label, a three-year stint at Berluti, and iconic red carpet designs for the likes of Tilda Swinton and Timothée Chalamet, the 53-year-old Ackermann has established himself as one of the industry’s great romantics, crafting garments imbued with a certain headiness and sensuality. Canada Goose, meanwhile, is best known for its hunkering, utilitarian, frost-impervious technical parkas. On paper, the chasm between them seems wide.

“It’s a bold choice to want me, and 10 years ago, maybe I wouldn’t have accepted this,” Ackermann muses over Zoom from London, where he’s working on designs for his other new gig—his forthcoming first collection for Tom Ford. His hair is expertly disheveled into Romanesque curls, with a gray sweater neatly draped over his shoulders.“But I’m in a moment in my life where I need nature, and nature is becoming a part of me much more than in the past.”