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of his actor friends live east of here, in Los Feliz,
and that his parents’ beach house, in Malibu, lies
to the west, he maintains a charming naïveté
about his hometown.
“When I come back to L.A. I feel like a total
alien,” he says from a perch on the tiny upstairs
patio at the San Vicente Bungalows, as power
lunches begin to disperse below. A few days
earlier, Platt, who will turn 26 this month, wore
heavy stubble and a black leather jacket to sing
on Jimmy Kimmel, but today his smooth cheeks
and dungaree overalls are a tether to childhood.
“I know where my orthodontist’s office is and
how to get to the musical-theater after-school
program I went to in the Palisades, but I don’t
know where it’s cool to eat or go out or to be a
quote-unquote adult. I went to see Booksmart
this weekend for the third time because my best
friend, Beanie Feldstein, and my other best
friend, Molly Gordon, and another best friend
of mine, Noah Galvin, are all in the film. We
did the Grove”—the inevitable outdoor mall
with squirting fountains and slow armies of
glazed-looking shoppers. “Does that count as a
spot?” (I’m afraid it doesn’t.)
Though he flew here to close his sold-out con-
cert tour at the Dolby Theatre, in support of
Sing to Me Instead, the album of pop songs he
cowrote and released this March, Platt stayed on
for his second-oldest sister’s engagement party,
then a backyard 40th-anniversary dinner for his
parents that held the promise of ample playtime
with the four nephews he adores. The Platts—
Ben’s father, Marc, a film, television, and theater
producer whose credits include La La Land;
his mother, Julie; and his four siblings—are an
intensely close family: “very warm, very Jewish,”
Ben explains. While he rents an apartment in
Westwood to prevent total reabsorption, it’s a
short enough walk to use his parents’ gym and
raid their fridge.
But this month, the child of Hollywood
makes another sort of homecoming with his first
onscreen starring CONTINUED ON PAGE 570My own persona remains sex, even if I’ve
moved on to a different stage in my reality.
The new me is 58 years old, with a six-year-
old kid upstairs, a 70-year-old husband. Very
different. But we’re human. Sex is a side ef-
fect of affection.”
The CFDA, whose mission is to enlarge
the profile of American fashion global-
ly, oversees a packed calendar of runway
shows and seminars, not to mention the ma-
jor awards night each spring that honors
the best of American design. Having spent
three decades working in Europe, Ford is in
a unique position to consider the challenges
that face the sometimes insular American
industry. (As Diane von Furstenberg put
it, “When I came in, they needed a mother.
Now they need a statesman.”) He has been
focused on condensing and decluttering the
Fashion Week schedules to five days, and
on consolidating the CFDA’s scattered cal-
endar of events to a pair of conferences,
one on each coast, where participants can
engage the myriad issues facing the future
of fashion: inclusivity, technology, sustain-
ability, and globalism, to name a few. This
month, he will kick off New York Fashion
Week by hosting a dinner for 50 emerging
designers, with American and international
press invited.
“I want global exposure to the creativity
that is in New York,” he says. “Everything is
too inward-looking in this country. So Amer-
ican star designers, they leave. Virgil Abloh,
where is he? He’s at Vuitton. You go to Paris
and you become global. You stay in New
York, and you’re in New York.” Ford would
also like to open up the CFDA Awards to
the international design world, though he
realizes it may be a hard sell with other mem-
bers of the board. “If you go to the British
Fashion Awards, they give the British prizes,
and then they give Best Womenswear, period.
Guess what? People are interested. You’ve
got LVMH brands nominated, you’ve got
Gucci nominated, and they all come, and it
raises money, and they bring their celebrities
and their models and the red carpet becomes
bigger, and there are more pictures, and peo-
ple start to care. By raising awareness of the
CFDA, you elevate the global perception of
American fashion.”
In his Gucci heyday, Ford had his share
of classic runway moments. For his own
line, though, he has experimented with inti-
mate, photographer-free presentations and a
video starring Lady Gaga; he has tried “See
now, buy now,” with little success; and he has
shifted his shows among multiple cities. The
traditional format, he believes, is the relic of
an era when long-lead press reigned supreme.
“The point of a show now is to create an
Instagrammable moment,” he says, “and the
reason that you have to show in a Fashion
Week, in a key city, is that you need as many
of the people that people care about in one
room at one time to shoot those images all
over the world. The images of the show, the
front row, the backstage, the makeup, the
hair, the clothes, the people, the boyfriends,
the girlfriends—and then have it reposted
and reposted and reposted and reposted.
That’s what a show is now.”
Ford watched the election returns in No-
vember 2018 from his home in London. He’s
a news junkie, a CNN and MSNBC tread-
mill addict who says that he should probably
take the advice of Eckhart Tolle and read
the newspaper only once every few weeks.
Since Trump took office, he complains of a
near-constant tension. He tries to feel hope-
ful. He believes that the greatest legacy of the
current administration will be a broad rein-
vigoration of interest in politics and govern-
ment. He is a huge fan of Pete Buttigieg and
met him at a small lunch early in his candida-
cy, where he felt he picked up on something:
At the table, on the stage, Buttigieg, for all
his silken rhetoric, seemed to look smaller
than he was due to the generous cut of his
suit. Ah, thought Ford—here’s something I
can fix. After the event, he texted Buttigieg’s
husband, Chasten, and offered a bit of sar-
torial guidance to the campaign. They didn’t
bite. “Obviously he can’t wear my clothes,”
Ford says. “They’re too expensive, they’re
wrong, they’re not made in America. And
besides, whatever he’s doing is working. So
does anyone need to fuck with it?”
In June, Ford attended the CFDA Awards
in the soaring Beaux Arts atrium of the
Brooklyn Museum under a vast skylight
that filtered the dusk overhead. As always,
his deep brown eyes conducted their swift
and merciless appraisal: The lighting should
have been lower, the tables might have been
round, and why couldn’t people just sit still?
(Roitfeld, his dinner companion that night,
says that being looked at by Ford is like be-
ing set inside a scanner.) The young New
York designer LaQuan Smith was wear-
ing one of Ford’s suits—double-breasted,
peak-lapeled, with the sleeves scrunched up.
Ford regularly sends him things to wear, in
part because he sees something of himself
in Smith, who designs sleek, traditionally
glamorous clothing and, for himself, has
been known to pair a Tom Ford tuxedo with
black patent women’s pumps. Among the
evening’s honorees was Eileen Fisher, whose
35-year-old brand has sought to reduce
fashion’s impact on the environment while
supporting young women in leadership
roles. Fisher herself cut an almost other-
worldly figure as she walked across the stage,
glitzless, in a white robe and black slippers,
a silver bob, no jewelry. Roitfeld turned to
Ford and whispered, “She’s so chic.”“Totally, totally, absolutely,” he says, back
in L.A. “Because she was herself, because
she was simple, because she was genuine.”
Ford, who has long felt that competition,
not coziness, ought to fuel the fashion in-
dustry, is about to start looking at Fisher’s
ideas and those of his other American fash-
ion colleagues in a new light. “Fashion is
a bubble,” he acknowledges. “Los Angeles
and New York and London are bubbles. But
this bubble generates an amount of content
that wraps the planet—what we send down a
runway, what we put in an ad campaign. We
are, actually, a liberal society. I think all of
us, by doing what we do and being who we
are, are an example to other people: There’s
nothing to fear.” @