Ford’s highly sexualized take on sixties and seventies silhouettes has been, in part, responsible for his astounding success. But there’s more to him than just a visionary designer. He is also a charismatic salesman, a ruthless brand executive, an innovative art director, and a canny marketing guru . . . all rolled into one. And it was precisely this skill for multitasking, as well as a meticulous attention to detail—and, let’s face it, a clear case of control-freakism—that set Gucci (and later the Tom Ford brand) on its path to world domination. As the writer Sarah Mower pointed out in Vogue, by the end of his tenure at Gucci in 2004 Ford was “designing fifteen men’s and women’s Gucci and YSL collections a year” as well as overseeing their advertising campaigns and filling the role of “corporate titan” who had masterminded the purchases of YSL, Balenciaga, and Bottega Veneta, and forged partnerships with Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney.
Dawn Mello, who first hired him in 1990 to work on womenswear at Gucci, recognized Ford as a prodigiously quick study. “He has a knack for seeing the whole thing together, not just the clothes,” she told Vogue in 1995. “I remember when we were looking for a menswear designer and Tom said, ‘Let me give it a shot,’ and I told him he had no experience in that area, but he just figured it out.”
Everything we think of when we think of Tom Ford—the high-impact runways shows, the lavish flagship stores, the notoriously risqué ad campaigns, even the film A Single Man, his stunning debut as a director—has an uncanny way of conveying the same three core themes: sex, power, and divine decadence.
“I don’t think I have ever worked with anyone with a greater passion for detail or a clearer vision of his aesthetic goals,” Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor in chief, wrote after he sat as her cochair for the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute gala in 2003. “As somebody disposed to my own brand of perfectionism, it was an unfamiliar experience to be outdone by a man whose persistence and exactitude puts my own to shame. Tom Ford, I realized, was the Flaubert of fashion.”
