Tom Ford’s late-night bash a repeat of last year

It was party déjà vu.

Tom Ford, in town to unleash a grenade of glamour, stuck to what he knows best on Sunday night: he recreated the exact same shindig, down to the location, decor and hedonistic lighting, that I’d attended the last time he zipped to Toronto for a movie, in 2009.

Like a master tailor who knows a slashed neckline that worked once will work again, the designer-slash-filmmaker hosted one of the most intimate of TIFF gatherings at the Gardiner Museum.

And just like the last time, Tom being Tom, and Ford being fab, he had the Gardiner (a ceramics museum, of all things) reimagined — a blacker-than-black palette, complete with a dark tunnel installed in the lobby of the museum (mood, darling). The main party, on the second floor: lots of white flowers . . . Corbusier-style chaises around the perimeter of the room . . . male-only servers, dressed in sharp black suits with crisp white shirts and itty black ties.

Did I mention that the party really just got going at 1 a.m.?

For one thing, Ford’s new film — his long-awaited followup to A Single Man — is called Nocturnal Animals, which did make the timing of the shindig fitting, if nothing else. In the movie itself — an off-kilter double-narrative reminiscent of Pedro Almodóvar’s films — there are many allusions to the insomnia of Amy Adams’ character, which made me wonder if her insomnia was a stand-in for Ford’s own.

Having said he gets by with three hours of sleep or so a night, the designer — who famously turned the foundering leathergoods house of Gucci, with only $200 million in revenue in the ’90s, into a $3-billion global fashion empire — once detailed his regular morning routine: wakes at 4:30, makes an enormous iced coffee, answers emails, makes himself a larger iced coffee, draws a bath, turns off the lights, lights a single candle, gets in the bath and drinks his second iced coffee via a straw while soaking before attacking the day. But I digress. The late start for the Toronto party was, in part, because the gala for Ford’s mesmerizing new movie was only slated for a 10 p.m. unspooling at the Princess of Wales.

For another, the screening started even later — what with so much frisson in the aisles and a roll-call of Hollywood megaplayers that included talent agent Bryan Lourd — and then got delayed even further when the movie actually froze about 20 minutes before it was supposed to end.

(They were able to get the movie going again, in a few minutes, but there was an interlude there, where the whole room was in the dark, and it was like a communal dance of dread.)

For the record: Ford, who was seated one row down from me in the theatre, and is one of the marquee perfectionists of our time, retained a superhero measure of calmness during these gruelling few minutes. Looking straight ahead, he may or may not have been reciting the Serenity Prayer.

At the after-soiree, he seemed equally “Que Sera, Sera,” hanging by the bar to catch up with Kate Hudson, who zipped in at one point. Stars of his films, such as Adams, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Michael Shannon circled the room, while Armie Hammer, who’s also in the film, was spotted grabbing a cigarette on the terrace of the museum that faces onto the Sunday-night stillness of the Royal Ontario Museum.

It was a civilized party, all right, with agent-y types heard comparing buzz-notes ( Sing, which debuted here earlier in the day, is better than Toy Story or Up, opined one), and others discussing the stars (“I’m a Gemini on the cusp, so I’m extra cranky this week”).

Someone else was heard to say: “I haven’t checked my voicemail since 2014.” Noted!

The other thing that stood out: this was one party, unlike almost every other TIFF party that typically happens in this town, where there was no step-and-repeat, and zero logos of any kind to be found. Logo-free: the very definition of chic.

Spotted

Matthew McConaughey, in town for the circus too, was spotted noshing at Sotto Sotto the other night. Shinan Govani’s transportation for the Toronto International Film Festival has been provided by BMW Canada.