On the evening of October 27 at Cipriani South Street in Manhattan, WWD Honors will recognize Morris Goldfarb, Haider Ackermann, Michael Rider and Henry Zankov, the first full night of the WWD Apparel & Retail CEO Summit across the 27th and 28th. The roster pairs the business of American fashion with its most closely watched creative hands.
Goldfarb, long the chief executive of G-III, stands for the industrial engine behind a constellation of licensed and owned brands. He is recognized for a career that has quietly moved billions of dollars of product through the country’s department-store apparatus.
Ackermann, Rider and Zankov, meanwhile, carry the creative register: Ackermann at Tom Ford, Rider leading Celine, and Zankov lending his knitwear precision to a house with Diane von Furstenberg’s backing. Each is being honored as much for a point of view as for a title.
The bill deliberately bridges two halves of an industry that rarely share a stage, the financiers who scale apparel and the designers who give it meaning. Their joint recognition reads as an argument that the two are indivisible.
Bernard Arnault is set to receive the John B. Fairchild Honor, and further honorees will be named in the weeks ahead, enlarging what is already a bellwether bill for the industry’s pulse heading into the winter season.
