506
O
fficially, the rose garden belongs to Rich-
ard Buckley, Tom Ford’s husband. It’s
the product of the only sort of deal that
Ford—among the shrewdest business-
men in the history of fashion—would
ever make, one whose terms were high-
ly favorable to himself: Buckley could
have his roses, and in exchange, Ford
got to make every other decision on
their new house in the Holmby Hills
neighborhood of Los Angeles, which
for more than half a century had belonged to Betsy Bloomingdale.
Ford does not cede control willingly. “I can’t help but assert myself,” he
says. “That probably makes me very difficult to live with.” He blames
his Virgo nature: precise, methodical, relentlessly observant, playfully
naughty if he trusts you. (The designer Stella McCartney, one of his
closest friends and another Virgo, says that any understanding of Ford
and of their friendship begins with this astrological detail. The stylist
Carine Roitfeld, his longest creative collaborator and another Virgo,
concurs. So might have his late friend Karl Lagerfeld, a Virgo, too.)
On a warm evening in June, the flowers are in abundant bloom.
Buckley, a writer and Ford’s partner of more than 30 years, consulted a
rosarian in Santa Barbara who had helped Oprah Winfrey and Barbra
Streisand with their roses. They excavated six feet and welcomed 10,000
earthworms, to the giddy delight of Jack, Ford and Buckley’s son, who
turns seven in September. Ford has a penchant for orchids—flowers of
heat and dark—but in fact it was he who arrayed
the garden in a perfectly gradated spectrum,
the way some obsessives organize their books
or their apps. Red roses, which he can’t abide,
crouch in the back. A few ambitious shrubs
stand taller than the others, balancing on stakes.
The asymmetry troubles him; symmetry is very
important. It is not surprising to learn that his
favorite rose, Koko Loko, is beige.
“Beauty gives me great joy, but it also gives
me great sadness,” Ford explains once we’ve
returned to the living room. We sit so that I can
see mainly the right side of his face—the side
you will always see in pictures. He says that he
has come to think of himself as an image, a product, and over time
you learn how to display the product at its most favorable angle. Kate
Moss will give you only one side, he says. “When I see the rose, and I
smell the rose, all I can think of is that the rose is going to wither and
be dead. But that’s one of the things that endows it with its beauty. If
it were permanent, you wouldn’t even notice it.”
Ford has often spoken of his preoccupation with death, the clock
incessantly ticking in his head, and he has also often spoken of his
dependence on alcohol, a palliative for his natural shyness. (In May,
he celebrated 10 years of sobriety.) Perhaps these two things above
all—the morbid cast of his temperament, his brain’s constant thirst
for dopamine—explain why, at 58, Ford is busier than he has ever
been. The brand he launched only 13 years ago now earns $2 billion in
annual retail sales across men’s and women’s ready-to-wear, accessories,
fragrance, cosmetics, and eyewear, a legitimate rival to 100-year-old
French houses. The writer-director-producer of two films, he has
another two in the works. And this spring, he succeeded Diane von
Furstenberg as chairman of the Council of Fashion Designers of
America, or CFDA.
“I’ve always been somewhat dysthymic, you know,” he says. “I sort
of operate at a slightly lower mood. I always felt that if you’re happy,
you’re just stupid. I still think happiness doesn’t exist and that if we all
didn’t expect it to exist, we would be a lot happier. Drinking and drugs
fueled many of my most creative moments, and I had an incredible fear
that once I was sober I would not be able to create. It takes some time
to get yourself back. We shift our addictions, and now my addiction
is work, but it brings me enormous pleasure. And it keeps my mind
from the fact that we are this tiny speck of a planet in the middle of
an infinite number of other planets, and everything we have, what
does any of it mean? Why do we struggle, why do we suffer? If I start
down that road, it’s like, guess what? I think I’ll do something really
important and choose the new lipstick colors for 2021.”
Ford opened an office in Los Angeles 15 years ago, shortly after he
and his business partner, Domenico De Sole, left Gucci Group amid
a bitter power struggle with its new owners. At the time, he thought he
was walking away from fashion altogether. He and Buckley owned a
Richard Neutra house in Bel Air but were splitting their time between
the West Coast and homes in London, Paris, and Santa Fe. Architecture
has been a more salubrious addiction for Ford, though lately he hopes
to do some deaccessioning: The Regent’s Park townhome designed
by John Nash is for sale, and so is the Tadao Ando–designed Santa
Fe ranch (the ubiquitous rattlesnakes making it unwise with a young
son). Earlier this year he bought a Paul Rudolph house on New York’s
Upper East Side that had belonged to his hero, Halston—the only
house that he would ever want in New York, a city he romanticized
in his early 20s but has lately avoided. Holmby Hills started off as a
1927 Mediterranean Villa, but in Bloomingdale’s tenure it was reimag-
ined as high Hollywood Regency, an effusion
of chinoiserie wallpapers, dark Chippendale
furniture, and green silk swags. Ford has done
a deluxe dial-down, unifying its jumble of
styles, introducing his favored monochrome
palette, and imposing a tactile minimalism of
velvet and lacquer, pony and cashmere. “I love
people’s houses that are incredibly colorful
and patterned,” he says. “But I can’t think in
them. Color distracts me.”
Buckley believes that, for a while, at least,
Jack had a transformative effect on Ford’s
relationship to color. “I think his fall-winter
2013 collection, with its clashing colors and
patterns, was a direct result of Jack being in his life,” he says. “The
thought of brightly colored plastic toys in his house was nothing
Tom wanted to see, but it’s what children like.” Order has since been
restored. “Now Jack tells people that his favorite color is black. At
the Hammer’s K.A.M.P. in 2017”—an annual family fundraiser at the
museum—“one artist asked the children to paint rainbows, and Jack
painted arc after arc in black.”
Ford wears a black suit, though he does not want to create the im-
pression that he is overly formal at home. “I often feel like I’m dressed
like I work in a shop, but I don’t have the energy, believe it or not, to
put together a new look,” he explains. “And I know what works on
me. Black, brown, gray. White for tennis. And by the way, these pants
have probably not been dry-cleaned in months. I wear the same things
day after day, I take them off at night and hang them up on a thing
that nobody uses anymore, a valet de nuit. I put my jacket on it, I flip
my pants over it, I dump my pockets out, and then the next morning,
I get up and Jack’s running around, and I’ve got to get him to school.
And so I just put it all back on.”
The house’s grisaille calm is offset by a sense of high stakes. The things
that remain are great things, particularly the art: Andy Warhol, Franz
Kline, Morris Louis, Lucio Fontana. Apart from a Cindy Sherman
“Making other people
beautiful, the search for
perfection, the need to
see women look like
elegant beings—that
drives Tom,” says a friend
