For just under €100, a new book celebrates the style - and ego - of Tom Ford, fashion's greatest maverick, and the man who popularised luxury, writes Deirdre McQuillan
Tom Ford, the handsome 43-year-old Texan who made his name and his fortune transforming an almost bankrupt Italian company into a multi billion-dollar global industry, has marked his tenure with Gucci with a massive black book.
One of the highest-paid fashion designers in the world, his style was characterised by hip-hugging velvet trousers and slinky jersey peephole sheaths, clothes that were brazenly sexy and often sexually ambiguous. He parted company with the owners of Gucci, the giant French conglomerate PPR, earlier this year, bowing out with a Chinese-inspired collection for YSL Rive Gauche, a brand he also masterminded, but with less stellar success.
This hefty, 415-page black bible weighs nearly one stone and is a typically Ford gesture: brash, lavish, and flashy, with contributions from industry heavyweights such as Anna Wintour (editor of US Vogue) and Graydon Carter (editor of Vanity Fair), as well as a lengthy interview with the man himself by Bridget Foley of Women's Wear Daily. And of course, loads of photographs and a lotta flesh.
Wintour's introduction says as much about her glacial style as it does about her subject. "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," she writes loftily. For her, the Ford woman was "sexy, confident and flirtatiously androgynous ... a creature that many of us longed to be". Carter's opening lines describes a sense of flattery at his "ass" being grabbed by Ford at a party in LA. Foley talks about his "mythic status". You get the vibe: everybody loves Ford.
The most interesting part of the book, however, isn't their contributions, nor page upon page of celebrities and cold models whose compromising positions are more provocative than the clothes, nor babies used as props, nor dwarfs modelling menswear, nor male buttocks in thongs and so on, but Ford's own very clear views on what fashion is all about and his mastery of image.
Making no secret of the fact that Gucci was about "dressing very slick, very glamorous, very beautiful, very chic, very lacquered women", he is credited with fostering the culture of celebrity and exalting a fame-hungry world of shameless ostentation. "The first thing I ask people [who want to work with me] is, do you want to be famous, do you want to be rich, do you want to have a jet?" Inextricably associated with the brand, he admits, "I have controlled my image. I am very private, which is important sometimes if you are a public person."
First and foremost an astute and determined businessman, who hates the idea of a team approach to design, his success with Gucci was to popularise luxury. "I have had impact regarding the idea of fashion designers as businessmen," he tells Foley, but when asked about his influence on fashion itself, replies lamely that he still sees people wearing decorated jeans.
For one so powered by ambition, his lack of success with YSL must still rankle. Yet, looking at the clothes themselves, exposing so much flesh and so little soul, it's hard to see any enduring qualities in them, anything that would inspire and galvanise another, less self-obsessed generation. But who else could boast in one year 345 magazine covers and 12,672 pages of editorial? Follow that.
Tom Ford, Foreword by Anna Wintour, Introduction by Graydon Carter, Interview and text by Bridget Foley, is published by Thames & Hudson, €96.20