566 SEPTEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 507
wrinkles. Hanging over her head in so many
pictures of her is that Calder. It retains an
emotional excitement for me.”
To McCartney, who met Ford more than
20 years ago, when she was designing Chloé
and they were both living in Paris, the phys-
ical world around him is a meticulous ex-
ternalization of his inner life. “When you
go to his homes—it’s painful, the level of
taste,” she says. “I joke, ‘Did you paint that
rock black?’ He’s like, ‘Of course I did.’ The
thing about Tom Ford is, he is Tom Ford. He
represents a specific woman, and he has an
emotional connection to who that woman is.
He doesn’t miss any part of that woman. You
smell it, you see it, you touch it, you hear it;
it’s all around you. At the same time, Tom
has a cheeky, childlike quality—there’s a
need to rebel from all that. But he is first and
foremost a gentleman. When he and Richard
asked me to be godparent to Jack, they both
got down on bended knee.”
Ford grew up reading his grandmother’s
W magazines, from the days when they were
still broadsheets. His eyes feasted on images
of Babe Paley and Nan Kempner. “I think
people today look at Kim Kardashian, and
probably it feels the same to them,” he says.
“That’s one thing I always like about Baz
Luhrmann’s films—this is going to seem
like a non sequitur, but it’s not. In Moulin
Rouge!, that cancan scene. It’s totally con-
temporary, the music and the vibe, but it
gives the audience the rush that you must
have had going into the Moulin Rouge. Or
the party scene in The Great Gatsby. I just
want to live at that party.” That’s more or less
what Ford did when he came to Manhattan
and caught the tail end of Studio 54, in 1979,
which has remained enormously influential
for him. Fifteen years later, he was trying to
immerse his own audience in this world when
he reanimated Gucci.
“When, in 1994, I sent that hypersexu-
alized Amber Valletta down the runway, it
was very new,” he says, “because of AIDS.
It was a reintroduction of the hedonism of
the ’70s, of that sort of louche, highly sex-
ualized, alcoholically lubricated, touchable,
kissable, slip-your-hand-into-the-blouse
thing that no one had seen on the runway
in a long time. There had been a complete
shutdown of sexuality after having sex in an
era when you could die from it.” He believes
his clothing hasn’t changed much since
then, and that has been by design: Figure
out what you do well, repeat it so forcefully
that it becomes unmistakable. Says Roitfeld,
“He’s never going to be a designer who does
a jacket with three sleeves. He’s not trendy.
He is interested in beauty.” Ford thinks
that if you’re lucky, you get about a 10-year
window in which what you do leaves people
breathless. He knows that it’s been almost 20
years since his own window closed, and yet
he has never been bigger.
“I have a very hard time taking compli-
ments, or complimenting myself,” he says,
“but I sometimes have to stop and think,
Wow: How am I wearing Tom Ford under-
wear right now, a Tom Ford watch, Tom
Ford cuff links, a Tom Ford shirt, a Tom
Ford suit, Tom Ford shoes, Tom Ford glass-
es, Tom Ford moisturizer, Tom Ford bron-
zer? How is there a Jay-Z song called ‘Tom
Ford’? In 12 years, how did that happen?”
Ford has been a generous incubator of fash-
ion talent; Alessandro Michele, Christopher
Bailey, Stefano Pilati, Vanessa Seward, Clare
Waight Keller are all former assistants. He
takes great pride in the fact that most of the
major European houses have been helmed
by someone who once worked for him.
As they built up Gucci Group, he and De
Sole acquired brands like McCartney and
McQueen. “All I had to do was say, Which
designers am I jealous of? And then, boom-
boom-boom, let’s buy those companies,” he
says. “I don’t think I’m jealous of anybody
now, and maybe that’s bad. It doesn’t mean
that I don’t look at other collections and
say, Okay, fuck—that was smart. I’m a com-
mercial designer. My great skill is that I have
elevated mass taste: Put five shoes in front of
me, and I’ll tell you which is the best seller.”
De Sole, Ford’s cocaptain since the Gucci
years, feels that what distinguishes Ford is
how much more than merely a designer he
is. “He may have a North Star, which is an
aesthetic that appeals to a lot of people,” De
Sole says, “but he’s also very careful about
timing, and he’s an amazing marketer. He
loves L.A., but he was an international de-
signer from day one, and that sets him apart
from other American designers.” Ford’s Los
Angeles is also about moviemaking, though
he acknowledges that it has sometimes come
at a cost. He feels that his collections suffered
during the period when he was promoting
Nocturnal Animals. He’s currently work-
ing on the screenplay for a sprawling period
piece, though he never reveals the details,
even to friends. “Hold all that energy,” he
says, “produce the damn thing, then unleash
it. Domenico is going to shoot me for saying
this, because he likes to tell people within
the company that I’m never going to make
another movie, but that’s not the case.”
Over the course of a decade, Ford has
secured the status of a singular Hollywood
auteur. His friend Lee Daniels, who was
promoting Precious during the season when
Ford was promoting his first feature, A Sin-
gle Man, feels that if it weren’t for industry
isolationism, Ford might have had to think
about where to position a statuette in his
otherwise tchotchke-less houses. “Had he
not been Tom Ford, he would have been
nominated for an Academy Award for that
film,” Daniels says. “People take him serious-
ly now. His moviemaking has the shock of
truth. It has a wicked sense of humor. And
like most great artists, I think, he’s working
through his pain.” Tom Hanks and his wife,
Rita Wilson, are among Ford’s and Buckley’s
closest friends in L.A. “A Single Man and
Nocturnal Animals were, essentially, low-bud-
get movies without any cheap aesthetics or
sacrifices, which takes a strong hand and a
soft touch,” Hanks says. “I’ve made a lot of
films, but I find myself listening to Tom talk
about directing a lot. Of course I still ask
him fashion questions like a pilgrim who
has climbed a mountain in search of wis-
dom, and he has imparted the most simple of
answers: Button the jacket, as it slims your
form. Use the pockets, as a jacket is like a
man’s purse—just don’t get bulky. Cap-toed
shoes go with everything.”
Ford’s clothing is not for everyone, some-
thing he readily admits. “It’s for a woman
who wants a waist, who wants to show her
figure,” he says. “She’s definitely wearing
high heels; she likes a certain sort of sleek
glamour. She could be 25 years old; she could
be 75 years old.” And while leisurewear and
streetwear continue to dominate the market,
he wages his long war against the casualiza-
tion of the culture. “Younger women don’t
wear clothes anymore. When I was young,
they had day, they had afternoon, they had
cocktail, they had evening. Now, whether
they’re a New York socialite or a movie star,
if they have to go to lunch, they drop the
kids off in leggings, then they put on a pair
of heels, maybe a jacket. But they want a
fucking amazing evening dress, and I have no
problem selling $20,000, $30,000, $40,000,
$50,000 evening dresses. But the strength of
any brand that endures is a singular, very fo-
cused vision. If you stay true, your customers
stay loyal, and eventually the world will swing
back to what you do that resonates.”
For a designer who brought an unabashed
sexuality to fashion in the wake of grunge,
this is a delicate moment. Definitions of
glamour and sexiness have evolved since the
Gucci girl, and the fact that Ford’s womens-
wear has yet to quite reach the same level of
commercial success as his men’s may reflect
this—though he would likely disagree. Mean-
while, the #MeToo movement has forced a
reckoning in fashion, and Ford, for one, has
had to think carefully about his branding. “I
wouldn’t shave a G into somebody’s pubic
hair anymore,” he says. “Political correctness
has become fashion correctness, and you al-
most can’t say a thing about anything. But
the bottom line is that I like the way women’s
bodies look, I like the way men’s bodies look.
