Looks from Haider Ackermann’s fall 2012 collection.

“When you prick the tip of your finger, the blood is this beautiful shade of dark red. The color does not last very long—as the blood dries, it goes brownish and looks horrible, but for a fraction of a second it’s incredible. Discovering that you have cut your finger can be distressing and painful, of course—but looking at that magnificent shade of red is a beautiful distraction. I long to work with fabric in that color, and I am always looking for it, but I’ve never found it. I have seen reds in Francis Bacon and Mark Rothko paintings that are as intense as blood red, with the same violence and fear and with a kind of perversion. All those layers of red paint, one on top of the other, feel very sexual.”

-Haider Ackermann, in an interview with Alice Rawsthorn in the August issue of W