At Tom Ford, the Power of a Perfect Suit

If you need to find the musician Harrison Patrick Smith in any room that he’s in, just look for the guy in the skinny black suit.

What the pinstripes are to the Yankees, a shrunken, chauffeur driver’s black suit is for Mr. Smith, 28, who performs as the Dare.

And so, on Wednesday evening in Paris, Mr. Smith sat at the Acne Studios fashion show wearing, what else? A reedy, single-breasted suit.

“They’re all slightly different,” he told me. I’ll take his word for it. The Acne suit he wore looked pretty much identical to every suit I’ve ever seen him in. Same slender cut. Same coal shade.

The first one, he said, was cobbled together at his local Goodwill in New York, but he now owns one by Gucci. Maybe, he hoped, Acne would let him keep this one. Mr. Smith said he could use a few more. He’s currently touring Europe, doing his sweaty one-man show.

What I thought was that he made a simple idea work. Years ago, he would have been just another guy in a suit, but men’s fashion has devolved, particularly for his baby-faced generation. Mr. Smith always sort of looks like he’s doing something subversive. Do I even need to point out that he was the only guy in the room wearing a suit?

The Dare though, would have looked less daring at the Tom Ford show an hour later. After all, there is no American label this side of Ralph Lauren for whom the suit has mattered more. Tom Brady, Jay-Z, David Beckham — if a man hovering around middle age made it to a best dressed list, a Tom Ford suit likely graced his shoulders. Mr. Ford has been a leading lobbyist for the meticulous suit since before Mr. Smith was born.

Last year, Haider Ackermann, a Colombian-born designer, was named the Tom Ford creative director. This was his first show for the label, and there was nothing to indicate that any of Mr. Ford’s hard-fought elegance had leaked out of the label.

Certainly, as I entered, sandwiched between what appeared to be two 50-something clients in glimmering tuxedos, I felt underdressed in my khakis and knit cardigan. All the more so when I spotted Mr. Ford in the front row wearing, of course, a double-breasted suit. Suited waiters ringed the room with martinis extended on silver trays — a signal, as I took it, that Mr. Ackermann intended to lead with tailoring. My dress-code inadequacy swelled.

That assumption was wrong. The first men’s looks were oil-slick sportswear: moto jackets with snap-button collars, cropped pebble-grain trousers and animal-skin boots tapering to a witchy pointed toe. I thought not of Mr. Brady, but Buzz Bissinger, the “Friday Night Lights” author whose fondness for uber-lux leather garments nearly sent him to financial ruin.

As Mr. Ackermann said backstage, Mr. Ford has always been “about suiting and red carpet, but there’s a daily life too, and I wanted to embrace that moment.” A very glossy daily life, perhaps.

But Mr. Ackermann did not hold fire on the tailoring for long. Eventually, the suits came. And kept coming.

A charcoal double-breasted suit, worn with a starchy microdot black-and-white shirt and a broad pinstripe suit peaking out beneath a belted trench were pure Patrick Bateman. No accident, as Mr. Ackermann said on a recent podcast that he had been thinking of “American Psycho,” that chronic touchstone for men’s fashion designers.

Backstage, he said he was also envisioning Mr. Ford and the authority that emanates from the founder in his firm-shouldered suits.

As the show flowed, Mr. Ackermann maintained the straight-backed architecture that makes Tom Ford suits a genuine benchmark for men, while redecorating the facade. Colors were bracing, and fits sat off the body just enough, while underpinnings aimed to startle traditionalists.

Though he smirked off the word backstage, there is still an aspirational glamour to these really excellent suits. But they were also charged with a “well, this is new” unconventionally that could draw in a new generation of clients that thumbed past suits previously.

Take the slouchy tweed number worn over a leather shirt, or the almost-tan double-breasted suit with roomy trousers that undulated as the model passed. Slouchy and roomy, it should be said, were not common adjectives during Mr. Ford’s time at the label. (Mr. Ackermann is yet another creative director whose best look may be his own. He took a bow in a capacious double-breasted model with the collar folded over in full self swaddle. Second-skin ease par excellence.)

Or consider the two suits — mint and robin’s egg blue — that were each paired with a fresh-as-driven-snow white shirt and white tie combo. Or the Aquafresh green sportcoat worn with sepia trousers, a lighter cigar-brown shirt and a black tie. (I can hear the ad now: Nine out of 10 leading fashion stylists endorse this look.)

Toward the end, a model in slicked-back hair arrived in a black-and-white dotted suit jacket with slightly contrasting black-on-black dotted trousers. I wish Mr. Smith had been there to see it. It might have convinced him to add a different sort of dark suit to his rotation.