Haider Ackermann: As A Child I Lived All Over The World. But Where Do I Belong?

My story begins in Bogotá, Colombia, where I was born in the spring of 1971. But am I Colombian? No. My beloved parents, who adopted me when I was nine months old, are French Alsatian. My brother and sister, who they also adopted, are Vietnamese and South Korean. By the time I was 12 years old, we had lived in France, Algeria, Chad and Ethiopia before settling in the Netherlands, my father’s work as a cartographer having taken us halfway around the world. (Back in the day, some of the greatest spies were mapmakers, but my father eventually persuaded me he was not one. I always thought it would have been tremendously romantic if he were.)

Growing up, we didn’t have things like toy cars, Barbies, TV. We played in the trees, with the animals that surrounded us wherever we were. Later, when I studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in the 1990s, people thought of me as a wild person. I wasn’t – I was just used to having total freedom, to living without borders. That, I believe, is the greatest luxury and privilege I have ever been afforded. But it’s a way of life that can sometimes muddle who you are. Where do I belong? That is the question I’ve grappled with throughout my life.

When you are a young child living in different countries, unable to speak the language of those around you, you become a keen observer. I paid attention to every detail, told myself stories about all the people I met. In Ethiopia, the elongated silhouettes of the women and men, wrapped in metres and metres of fabric, looked like Giacometti sculptures reaching out to touch the sun. It was for their protection, but to my child’s eyes they were fantastical, mysterious beings. (After more than 25 years working in fashion, Ethiopian cotton is still the best I’ve ever seen or touched.)

In Algeria, the women wore all white, except in the southern desert, where they were swathed in black. Every day, I was confronted by these beautiful phantomlike figures walking in the shade cast by the walls. When President Boumédiène died in 1978, women threw themselves off buildings to honour him. My mother tried to cover my eyes, but I saw the billowing white fabric falling from the sky. Even now when I’m travelling, if I see a curtain blowing in the wind I can sit there for 20 minutes, watching the way the fabric dances: peaceful, then suddenly violent. It moves me.

It is childhood experiences such as these that would define not just the person, but the designer I became. I remember my mother, who worked in an architecture office before leaving to care for us while on the move, taking me to Muslim weddings where the women were veiled until they entered the room with the bride. Once the festivities started, there was an orgy of jewellery, colour, fabric. As an eight-year-old, I was hypnotised – drunk on the dancing and the chanting and the taste of everything.

My siblings lived in exactly the same places, but they remember different things. My brother, for example, doesn’t remember the time in the Sahara when, after travelling across the dunes for hours, we saw what looked like a black cloud in the distance. We couldn’t figure out what this mirage was, but, as we approached, we saw hundreds of men saying their prayers. They belonged to the Tuareg, a nomadic group known for wearing dark blue robes. Watching them moving in unison was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen – and all because we were there with my dad, his tripod and his little camera.

So when we moved to Holland, and I was enrolled in a very bourgeois Catholic school, it was all very confronting. Suddenly there were only Dutch kids with blonde hair and then me, with all my many different backgrounds. My sense of carefreeness around clothes – a sarong and a T-shirt was the extent of my personal style back then – was stripped away and replaced by a strict dress code, which I still struggle to comprehend now. I quickly started to speak fluent Dutch instead of the Arabic we grew up with in Africa, determined not to be a stranger. For the first time, the focus was on being like everyone else, on fitting in.

At 17, I left my parents’ home and moved to Amsterdam to try and find myself, but I was too used to carrying my house on my shoulders. Eventually, my own free-spirited path led me to Antwerp to study fashion design, where I would funnel my memories of all those diverse cultures into the fabrics I had long dreamt of. The vestige of my past? The scarves I still carry with me to this day. I’m a shy person and I like to hide away.

In 2013, aged 42, I returned to Colombia for the first time. I can’t remember anything about those very first months of my life that I spent in Bogotá, but, when I arrived, I somehow felt instantly at home. My body must have recalled something. The hugging and the hand-holding of everyone I met felt very familiar, even though my family isn’t tactile – our love and respect for each other manifests differently.

As we’ve grown older, my siblings have settled. I have a house in Paris, but for my parents and me, finding a sense of permanence has been harder. Of all the places from my childhood, I return to my grandmother’s village, Carqueiranne, in the south of France most often. No matter where we were based in the world, every summer we would go there to run among the fig trees and mimosa fields. It was a point of stability. In the mornings, my grandmother would teach me about the plants in her garden and in the evenings we’d jump off the cliff into the ocean. (You’ll hardly find me on a beach now – 10,000 umbrellas is not my thing.) My mother dreamt of retiring there, but this romantic way of seeing things wasn’t the reality. She felt she didn’t belong.

Losing myself in nature is still where I find calm – it’s a reminder that you are so small in the world. In my time at Canada Goose, we have taken expeditions to Utah, Iceland, Canada and most recently to Chile to kayak among the glaciers. In Utah, I had this very strange idea that I wanted to have breakfast on one of the highest rocks. As we looked down at the immense view, everyone was suddenly grabbing each other and crying. To be moved by nature is mind-blowing. I’ll be forever grateful to my parents for showing me the world, and the richness of our travels. They gave me the ultimate gift: they opened my eyes.

Haider Ackermann is creative director of Canada Goose and Tom Ford. As told to Alice Newbold.