Tom Ford's new focus

Gemma Champ

• Last Updated: November 14. 2009 10:47PM UAE / November 14. 2009 6:47PM GMT

The designer and film maker Tom Ford may soon make a comeback in the world of women's fashion. Courtesy Tom Ford

From his single-handed revitalisation of Gucci to his innovative approach to the aesthetics of cinema, Tom Ford is a man of many accomplishments. However, his greatest achievement may be a much more personal reinvention.

“Oh, excuse me,” murmurs Tom Ford sheepishly, as he leans over his can of Diet Coke and discreetly belches. He catches my eye. “Excuse me. I don’t like seeming human,” he deadpans, gently mocking his self-perpetuated reputation for being some sort of hyper-perfect, control-freak fashion automaton.

This is the new Tom Ford: as impeccably dressed and preternaturally good looking as ever, but newly approachable, funny and self-deprecating, embracing what he calls his “spiritual side”. That’s not to say that he is suddenly going to kick back and take things easy. Since leaving Gucci, the label that made him famous, in 2004, the man has not only established an international bespoke menswear business, created 24 fragrances and designed everything from sunglasses to a Villa Moda khandoura: he has also written and directed a critically acclaimed film and is contemplating returning to womenswear. “Leisure” is a word that has little meaning for Ford.

“People crack me up when they say, ‘Let’s hang out’,” he marvels, adopting a dopey voice to demonstrate the pointlessness of such an exercise. “I don’t know what that is! I can’t wander around aimlessly, like, ‘Oh, let’s go here...’ I can’t do that. I have to have a schedule. So if I’m going to relax, I know that I have two hours to relax on this day, from this time to that time.” Of course, while he willingly laughs at his own foibles, Ford knows that this is just the sort of statement that will confirm the suspicions of those who decry the designer for his unsentimental view of fashion.

His mastery of PR over the last 15 years and his tight control of his image have led some people to tag him as much marketeer as designer. “Fashion has always been a commercial endeavour to me,” he says at one point. “It doesn’t mean I’ve churned out things I didn’t love because I thought they’d be commercial, but the primary function of clothing is to wear and to be sold. So it’s artistic but it’s commercial.”

Yet to see Ford as merely a photogenic and business-savvy clothes designer is to do him a serious disservice. Certainly his role as a kind of savant of the zeitgeist is well-established. Like his near contemporary and fellow Parsons alumnus Marc Jacobs, his ability to feel, capture and propagate the mood of the moment is uncanny yet apparently unforced. Ford’s breakthrough came in 1995 when, having worked at the then-failing Italian leather goods brand Gucci for some years, his first collection as creative director was a decade-defining series of rock ’n’ roll velvet suits with hipster pants, lean satin shirts, bed hair and smudgy eye make-up.

He was a star, and Gucci was transformed from a maker of high-quality but frumpy bags and loafers into a huge fashion player that would later, with the luxury-goods conglomorate PPR, go on a buying spree of companies from Yves Saint Laurent (of which Ford was also head designer) to Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney.

This was the era of “masstige” – the peddling of previously exclusive labels to the masses, something that at the time was seen as a democratisation of luxury but that has, in retrospect, been the author of many of the fashion industry’s ills today. The result was the logo mania of the early Noughties, a trend that Ford was instrumental in creating but has since been at pains to avoid. But this corporatisation of the luxury market was also the movement that would see Ford lose creative control of the brand, resulting in an acrimonious departure from Gucci in 2004, taking with him Gucci Group NV’s president and CEO Domenico de Sole, who is now thechairman of Tom Ford International.

Hoist by his own petard, Ford vowed that he would not return to fashion, and he has made no secret of the difficulty he had dealing with this sudden change in his life – a change that is behind the new, improved Tom Ford we see today.

“I really didn’t think I was going to go back to fashion, but I was in a moment of just extreme burnout, quite honestly. I had been doing 16 collections a year for Yves Saint Laurent and Gucci, and I worked so hard for so long. And I love designing, but the business of fashion? Mmm. Not so much.”

At 48 (though he barely looks 38), Tom Ford is in reflective mood when we meet in The Address hotel in Downtown Burj Dubai: an older, wiser person than the hard-partying, good-living young man of old: the image in which his public persona was forged.

“I was fortunate enough to have all the material success that the world can offer at a very early age. I had a great personal relationship, I had friends and I had… really everything that in our society one is told we’re supposed to have and that is supposed to make us happy. And it didn’t make me happy. I had neglected the spiritual side of myself, which was always there. I’d sort of pushed it to the back and really come to believe that if I have one more house or more success that I was going to be happy.

“This is something in the western culture. We never say, ‘You know what, I have everything I need now.’ It’s always, ‘Well, when I get this, and when I get that, and when we have that, when I get that job, when I get this new girlfriend, when I get that pair of shoes,’ and it’s an unending – ungratifying, ultimately – way of life.”

This is, of course, a little rich coming from the designer who returned to fashion in 2007 with a plan to create high-luxury, super-exclusive, made-to-measure men’s suits and shoes at prices that only the wildly wealthy would ever contemplate. He has homes around the world, including a Tadao Ando-designed ranch in Santa Fe (he grew up in Texas and Santa Fe and spends his downtime there), and this Christmas he will holiday for three weeks on Mustique. It is safe to say that he will not be giving up worldly pleasures any time soon. He acknowledges the irony, but defends his stance.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with materialism to a certain extent,” he argues. “We are actually physical, material beings. We do sit in a room, look at the sun, feel fabric: we experience these things. So as long as you keep them in perspective they can add to the joy of being a human alive on our planet. But you have to keep them in perspective. So I enjoy what I do in terms of design, I enjoy creating things and making things, and I’ve always been very meticulous about the details, but maybe I’ve placed a little too much importance on that at certain times of my life.” He is the very model of a modern Epicurean.

It was his post-Gucci epiphany that led him to the making of A Single Man, a film for which its star, Colin Firth, received the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival and that is already being talked about as an Academy Award contender. One would have expected, of course, a visual tour de force from this fashion icon (especially given that he used the Mad Men production designer Dan Bishop for his sets), but what has surprised everyone is the fact that the film was not a case of style over substance: it is, in fact, a profoundly tender and sensitively conceived film that has garnered plaudits from even the industry’s harshest critics.

For Ford, the story, based on Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of the same name, is one that has universal significance. Firth plays a college professor whose long-term love has died, leaving him determined to take his own life. On what he believes to be his final day on earth, his perception of the world he lives in is heightened and he sees the real beauty in life.

“He has a kind of epiphany and understands his connection to the world, to the universe, his connection to other people, and he has a real understanding and a kind of joy. I would say most people, at some point in their life go through some sort of change of life or crisis,” he points out. “I think that all three of our principal characters in the film can’t see their future. George can’t see his future, Charlotte can’t see her future, Kenny can’t see his future. They’re all in a moment where their life is about to change and I’ve certainly experienced that. I experienced it to a dramatic degree when I left Gucci.”

Making a feature film is certainly a leap for a fashion designer, but Ford, it seems, lets nothing as trivial as fear prevent him from doing what he wants to.

“I was very nervous the first time I ever screened it for a group of people. In fact, I was physically ill. But during the process I wasn’t nervous, and I don’t usually think, ‘Oh people are gonna like this, people are not gonna like this...’ Usually if I believe in something, I just do it. It isn’t that I’m not afraid; it’s just that I don’t choose to let my fear stop me if I believe in something.”

As both a designer and a filmmaker, the influence of old movies on Ford (who was an aspiring actor before he went to Parsons to study architecture) is very evident, from his vision of Firth as a sort of Cary Grant to his conception of fashion as a sort of visual narrative. He cites Hitchcock, Wong Kar-Wai and the Italian realist Vittorio De Sica’s heartbreaking film Umberto D as “all-time favourites”, and his own movie shows the strong influence of these great fillmmakers.

But his sense of character is not confined to the screen. His public persona is a conscious creation, and he has talked before of the place of character in fashion, when, for example, describing the difference between the Gucci woman and the Yves Saint Laurent woman.

“Womenswear is very much about where our culture is at a particular moment,” he says. “Women in our society and what they wear are a physical expression: if we’re in a very flashy glittery moment, women are wearing flash. If we’re in a calm, more sedate, more introspective moment, it’s reflected in clothing. Men dress pretty much the same way all the time. It changes slightly, which is also one of the interesting things about designing it, because you have a very narrow framework in which to work. Menswear for me is very much about the cut, the quality.”

It is clear that the brash, modern iconoclast of the Gucci days is long gone. When Ford returns to womenswear, he says, it will not be to the crazy world that he left. “I haven’t quite come to terms with making the commitment of coming back to women’s fashion. I love the designing, but all the sort of craziness that goes into shows and the very inside quality of a very few people thinking that the world revolves around your type of heel and look for that season – I don’t want to go back to that.”

Is this thoroughly contained man still flinching from the harsh industry that made him and broke him with such short shrift? Or is he simply once more ahead of the game with his return to the exclusivity of luxury and the pleasant certainties of good manners, fine fragrances, hand stitching and horn-rimmed spectacles?

“You know, I did grow up maybe at the end of ‘manners’,” he muses. “When I used to fly as a little kid we had to wear a jacket and tie. No one does that any more. Some of my favourite fragrances were the original Guerlain, fragrances that were quite classic. I was born in 1961 and the Fifties really continued until Kennedy was assassinated.

“My references are maybe, in a lot of ways, old-fashioned. I like manners. I like men to stand up when a woman comes into the room – that doesn’t mean that I’m sexist at all: I’ll stand up when men come into a room too; I think of it as a polite gesture. So I think that I’m maybe left over from another age,” he sighs.

And with that hint of nostalgia in his voice, it seems that Ford is human after all.