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Fantastic Mr Ford
He sexed up Gucci, made his own label a multibillion-dollar success and has become the toast of Hollywood… Lisa Armstrong meets the one and only
Lisa Armstrong has an audience with Tom Ford, the designer turned Bafta-nominated film-maker who remade Gucci and redefined glamour
Los Angeles can do strange things to people. It can have them rise and shine at 4.15am, on a treadmill at 4.30am, eating supper at 6pm and tucked up in bed by 10, when they used to be a party animal. It can make them buy a flamboyantly twirly-fronted ‘Hollywood Regency’ mansion when they’re a confirmed minimalist. It can prompt them to pin a photograph of Georgia O’keeffe by their bathroom mirror to remind them, when they’re tempted to get a facelift, a plasma infusion or have their skin lasered off, that growing older isn’t always a tragedy. And it can make them embrace colour, when normally the zappiest they’re prepared to go is navy.
I’ll have to take Tom Ford’s word for it that he wears colour now, since he’s head-to-toe in black when we meet in London, where he’s temporarily touched down to check in with his menswear team who still work out of a studio here, and have dinner with his old friend Stella Mccartney. The only real colour in his sleek master-of-the-fashion-universe office comes from a plate of Percy Pigs, which he professes to love but, needless to say, doesn’t touch. You don’t look the way he does at 57 – slim, tanned, eternally youthful – if you trough down platefuls of pink sugar. ‘It’s good genes,’ he says solemnly. ‘I don’t do anything.’ ‘NOTHING?’ ‘OK, Botox, but that’s nothing.’ In LA maybe.
Above all, LA can make a person happy – nine out of 10 happy – even when they’ve had a terrible year.
Tom Ford is, he declares, nine out of 10 happy. He looks it and sounds it too, his voice skeetering up and down several octaves throughout our interview. Yet he has had a terrible year: his husband, the journalist Richard Buckley, was dangerously ill. There is a reason, beyond fondness for the Bee Gees, that the soundtrack to his autumn/winter 2019/20 show in New York last month featured Stayin’ Alive.
The two have been together over 30 years and have a six-yearold son, Jack. It was because of Buckley’s health that they left London in 2017 for the kinder Californian climate. None of this is to invite sympathy, neither from the outside world nor each other. ‘Are you kidding?’ snorts Ford. ‘Richard is still my harshest – and I mean HARSH – critic. I can put on a show that everyone says is incredible and Richard will say, “Outfit number three, the blacks don’t match” – and I will crumble.’
I don’t think he’s exaggerating his hurt feelings. Ford, for all his bluff and charm, is a sensitive soul who has been known to call up journalists, not to scream, like some designers – he’s too civilised, too intelligent and enjoys living on his wits too much for that – but to explain, painstakingly, why their review is wrong and, OK, maybe spar with them a little, but never menacingly. At one point, he removed himself from the bear pit of criticism altogether, banning mobile phones from his shows (he says it was mainly to beat the copyists, but they’re unbeatable). Sometimes, notably after an especially savage review, he bypasses journalists too, going straight to the fans. A couple of years ago, instead of a show he engaged the services of Lady Gaga and some models who gyrated across a Nick Knight-lit studio in Tom Ford and put the film on Youtube. Who needs critics these days?
He does. Sooner or later, he returns, like the prodigal student, for approbation. Indeed, for someone thin-skinned, he puts his work out there to what some might consider a masochistic degree. After leaving Gucci following a business disagreement in 2004, he set up his own luxury fashion and accessories label when, as an exceedingly wealthy man, he could have luxuriated in a relatively easy, but stimulating life as the power behind other brands. (He has decent form as a mentor and talent spotter, having financially backed Zac Posen and Jeremy Scott, and given Christopher Bailey, Clare Waight Keller and Alessandro Michele their big breaks.) Then he launched a career in film. This is not a normal trajectory and it’s fair to say even the fashion industry, with its inflated sense of grandeur, was sceptical.
A Single Man (Ford’s first film, starring Julianne Moore and Colin Firth) was released in 2009; his second, 2016’s Nocturnal Animals was nominated for nine Baftas – ‘Nine,’ he reiterates, banging his fist on his desk. I note he doesn’t mention the Oscar nominations and Golden Globes both films racked up – an Anglophile, even in his current self-imposed exile. ‘After A Single Man came out, people kept saying to me, it must feel so good, because of course everyone was laughing at you. I hadn’t realised any of that.’
Ford wrote, directed and financed the film himself. It cost him £7 million (which suggests Moore and Firth must be very good friends indeed) and made a respectable-for-art-house £20 million, of which, he says, he never saw a cent, because he sold the distribution rights to Harvey Weinstein and a bunch of other people. Not that money was the point. It was a critical smash, the best calling card in the world for a man who’d been feeling lost.
Maybe the reason he’s so happy is not that he plays tennis in the sunshine three mornings a week (his explanation, and OK, probably it helps), but because he has authorship over his own life: huge amounts of money and the imagination to know how to spend it. ‘Yeah, money does that,’ he agrees. ‘That’s what it’s about – freedom.’
He’s just optioned a novel – he won’t jinx it by revealing its title just yet – for his third film and is currently trying to work out how to turn 600 pages into a two-hour film. Why not a Netflix show? He doesn’t want to, even though he and Buckley spend their happiest evenings at home watching ‘everything. You name it, we’ve seen it.’ The challenge isn’t so much condensing the material as finding the time to do it. ‘The trouble is,’ he says (semi-jokingly), ‘my other business is just too successful.’
‘It’s good genes. I don’t do anything.’ ‘NOTHING?’ ‘OK, Botox, but that’s nothing’
In a way, the success of Tom Ford, the label, is as unlikely as his film career. Lightning doesn’t usually strike twice. And yet, post-gucci, Ford presides over a brand that now has a $2 billion a year turnover. If some pundits argue that most of that revenue comes from eyewear (1.8 billion pairs of glasses sold last year at around £350 each) and highly lauded beauty and fragrance ranges, well that’s the way fashion works. ‘The readyto-wear absolutely anchors the look and feel of my brand so in that sense it’s paramount.’ It’s true too, in a sense, that Ford isn’t setting any kind of new agenda with his clothing the way he did back in the ’90s and early noughties at Gucci (The New York Times said of his show this February, ‘You’ve got to hand it to Mr Ford, he knows how to spin familiarity’). But for those who have a fondness for peak Ford-gucci moments, those purple satin trousers and lavender tops in his latest collection look grown-up and fabulous. And anyway, maybe new versus old is a false dichotomy in fashion these days. Balenciaga and Offwhite, two brands most often cited as edgy, actually make most of their money selling trainers.
‘I understand cerebrally what’s going on in fashion now,’ says Ford, of the deliberate ugliness cultivated on many catwalks and fashion shoots. ‘But if you tell everyone it’s fine to look like shit, as long as it’s ironic and they’re in on the joke, then you hit the end of fashion, which I think some brands have. If you tell people you don’t need to put things together in a thoughtful way and it works commercially for a while, then you create a monster. It’s like The Hunger Games, where they’ve reached a level of wacky that’s hard to relate to.’
One senses this is a conversation he’s had more than once at home. His last few collections have seen him channel his inner classicist – great tailoring and boardroom-sexy slinkiness – after a period in which he too reached a certain level of wacky. ‘And guess what, they’ve been my best received by the retailers. But not Richard. Ever the journalist, Richard says, “Yes, they’re beautiful but there’s no news there.” And I say, “Well, beautiful is the news.”’
His mother, now into her 80s (‘She wouldn’t thank me for saying that’), would agree. Shirley Ford is a Texan rose who never answered the doorbell without first reaching for her lipstick, and her son turned this shared passion for make-up into an extraordinarily lucrative business. (Where would fashion be without forceful mothers?)
It would be plain wrong to suggest that Ford is now sinking gently into some ‘good night’ where he only dresses stately Texan matrons. He still scores a good strike list among the contemporary as well as the grandees, including Rihanna, Beyoncé, Gwyneth Paltrow and Julianne Moore, ‘although not often on the red carpet. Even my best friends, actors who I go on vacation with, can’t wear me on the red carpet or even come to my shows, because they have contracts with other brands, and I won’t pay people to wear my clothes.’ On the other hand, given how bad he thinks most red-carpet dressing looks these days (‘Last year, when they all wore black for Time’s Up, was the one time everyone looked good. You cannot go wrong in black’), maybe that’s not such a tragedy. He seems reconciled to his position as one of the industry’s éminences grises. Not that there is any trace of gris on his head. At any rate, he relishes seeing women of all ages enjoying his designs. ‘This idea that a woman
somehow becomes invisible when she gets older… it’s all about how you carry yourself. You can walk into a room at any age and command it.’
What about all those alumni of his, now so advanced in their careers, does that make him feel like Father Time? ‘Nope. It makes me proud – and really happy that I own my own company so I can’t be kicked out of the door if I have a bad season or two. I don’t understand this revolving-door policy. It would be interesting to see if ultimately it destroys the brand value, because you walk into a store and everything’s different from the last designer. The decor, the clothes…
‘Actually, Alessandro [Michele] is what helped me get over Gucci, because he’s doing such a great job there. It’s completely different from what we did when I was there, and yet there are some threads.’
Ford has been vocal about how hard it was leaving Gucci, but it’s surprising to hear that he still felt raw when Michele became creative director in 2014 – a decade after he left. ‘Oh my God, I don’t miss any of it now… but it [leaving] threw me into a midlife crisis. Who am I ? What am I going to do? The drinking.’ He’s now teetotal. Is that more LA influence? ‘It doesn’t hurt. I mean, can we just talk about the drinking in London? The two glasses at lunchtime. The three vodka tonics you have in the evening at the office, ’cos you’re there till eight? The two you have in the bath. Then you go out to dinner and they bring you more teenytiny drinks. So you’re now up to 10 and then you go on to a party and you’re in your 40s, drinking 12-13 glasses a day. And eating lettuce to stay slim. I spent so many days writing apology notes and sending flowers. It had to stop.’
They had their moments though, the peak Gucci years. The celebrities. The private jets. The head-spin of being king in an era that seems more permissive than now. The Gucci logo that was topiaried into a model’s pubic hair for an ad that was splashed across glossy magazines. ‘It was the year of the logo. Marc had them over everything at Vuitton… but yes, you probably wouldn’t do that now,’ he remarks wryly. This was the period when Ford worked constantly with Mario Testino (who has since been accused of sexual misconduct – Testino denies all allegations) to create many other memorable Gucci images that helped stake out the brand as the hottest, sexiest, most sophisticated in the world. ‘Did Mario climb on top of the models? Yes, but come on, you’re shooting a fragrance ad. It’s got to look sexy and Mario’s an exuberant kind of guy.’ Ford launches into Testino’s flamboyant Peruvian accent and starts crawling on the carpet of his office. ‘Darleeeeng, you’re so sexeeee…’ It’s not a bad impersonation actually.
He resumes his position back on his seat and becomes more serious. ‘Yes, he flirted. Yes, he was silly. He was Mario. I’m not saying that I know what went on behind closed doors. I’m just saying I don’t think I saw anything untoward on set.’
In LA, in the Hollywood Regency mansion (for which, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Ford paid $39 million) that used to belong to Betsy and Alfred Bloomingdale, close friends of the Reagans, all is propriety. It has an amazing, sweeping staircase. ‘Very Fred Astaire. It’s definitely a white tails house.’ Most importantly it has all those acres for Jack and his English nanny to play in: ‘I’m hoping she’ll help him keep his English accent. So far so good.’ He’s a polite child, ‘at least polite by LA standards’, who had to pay for the zip wire that was installed in the garden out of his pocket money – ‘We told him it cost $125’ – and thinks the most heinous word in the English-american dictionary is ‘awesome’. The teacher at his impeccably liberal school had to have a word with Ford about this, since it seemed rather eccentric, especially given how often Jack’s classmates use the word. ‘Well, it is awful,’ says Ford. Worse than swearing? ‘Jack doesn’t know any yet.’ Amazing, given Ford’s most successful perfume yet is boldly entitled F—ing Fabulous.
Ford is currently reading a self-help book, The Life-changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k. ‘Don’t bother,’ he says, when I ask whether it’s any good. I’m interested that he still thinks he needs a book like that, after all the therapy and life experiences. ‘A lot of it is actually Buddhism.’ (The last time I was in this office he was waxing lyrical about the I Ching). Is Buddhism why he turned vegan? ‘No, that happened two years ago after I watched [provegan documentary] What the Health. That part when they chop up the dead sick pigs for the living ones to eat…’
He misses his British friends but says that now he’s living in LA he finds London formal and out of sync with the rest of the world. ‘All that business of having to wear a suit and tie…’ Yes, well maybe, if you always eat at Mark’s Club, which he did when he lived here. Talking to Ford about London is a bit like reading Henry James – entertaining, but not topical.
At some point, he says, the family will probably move from LA to somewhere ‘there’s more culture, for Jack. He’ll need to know what it feels like to put on a jacket.’ Ford loves a project. ‘I always had a five-year, a 10-year, a life plan. I was always aware of the clock ticking. I’ve been aware of mortality since I was eight. All I want is to stay alive till Jack’s 21.’ And to convince his young son not to paint his bedroom black. The family is in constant dialogue about Jack’s interior decor proclivities, which sees Ford, whose natural preference would also be for black walls ‘but not for a child’, playing devil’s advocate. It’s a losing game. You can lead a child halfway round the world to sunshine, it seems, but you can’t necessarily make them sunny. Even in LA.
‘Yes, Mario flirted… He was Mario… I don’t think I saw anything untoward on set’