Review of Tom Ford Fall 2026 Ad Campaign by Creative Director Haider Ackermann with Photographer Stuart Winecoff and models Liu Wen, Paolo Grebic, Mila Van Eeten, Aluel Makuach, Scott Barnhill, Benjamin Orlan, Ardi H, Kristen McMenamy, Malick Bodian, and Alfredo Ramirez
Tom Ford has always treated sex as a language. Haider Ackermann expands the conversation to the character doing the speaking. His intention for Fall 2026 is explicit: a study of individuals across ages and walks of life who have flirted with debauchery and now stand upright, unfiltered and defiant. Photographed by Stuart Winecoff beneath glaring light against clinical white, they carry the evidence of experience across their faces, clothing, and manners. Clothing functions as autobiography. The campaign examines what seduction becomes once fantasy has been stripped of its scenery.
At it’s best, Winecoff’s images turn the white studio into a charged social arena. A stockinged leg and stiletto frame an older man’s face. A bleached head approaches Liu Wen’s sharply tailored torso. Aluel Makuach reclines in pinstripes beside Malick Bodian’s immaculate formality, creating a quiet contest of authority. These pairings give Ackermann’s “opposites attract” premise its tension. Age, gender expression, polish, and ease occupy the same field, while power continually changes hands through posture and proximity. The cast feels chosen for presence, with each person contributing a distinct history to the house’s evolving discourse of desire.
Luxury advertising could use a recovery of erotic nerve, and Tom Ford should help lead it. The house’s world also needs enough psychological and cultural depth for sex to signify something. Ackermann clearly understands that distinction, though the clinical severity occasionally cools the heat he is describing. Greater physical risk, intimacy, or disorder could have allowed the images to tremble more visibly with human substance. Even so, the underlying proposition feels promising: seduction as lived character, shaped by experience and carried with defiance. The question for Ackermann’s Tom Ford is how far that idea can move beyond the white room and become a world of its own.
Tom Ford Creative Director | Haider Ackermann
Photographer | Stuart Winecoff
Models | Liu Wen, Paolo Grebic, Mila Van Eeten, Aluel Makuach, Scott Barnhill, Benjamin Orlan, Ardi H, Kristen McMenamy, Malick Bodian, Alfredo Ramirez
Hair | Tom Wright
Makeup | Lucy Bridge