A designer ready for a change
Act 2, Scene 1: After 13 years at Gucci, four of those at Yves Saint Laurent as well, designer Tom Ford is settling back into his life in Los Angeles, contemplating trading the fashion industry for the film industry -- he’s already signed with Bryan Lourd at Creative Artists Agency -- and thinking about a new set of wheels.
“I could get a sports car,” Ford, 42, says during a break from shooting Gucci’s fall ad campaign with Mario Testino at a photo studio on La Brea. “But that’s kind of the mark of a midlife crisis. So maybe I’ll get a Volvo. That says, ‘No midlife crisis. Secure enough to drive a Volvo.’ ”
Having dressed everyone from Nicole Kidman to Tom Hanks, and even done a bit of acting himself, he’s no stranger to Hollywood. But when it comes to working here, he’s playing the part of tactful newcomer. He wouldn’t go on record about what he thought of “The Passion of the Christ,” which he raced to see in the three days he spent in L.A. for the Oscars between his last Gucci show in Milan and his last YSL show in Paris.
“This is a movie town, and I’m not going to open my mouth before I’m ready to open my mouth,” he says, sitting back coolly in jeans, a black velvet blazer and a white cowboy shirt unsnapped to reveal a triangle of tan. “People think of me in a certain way in regard to my design, which is somewhat slick and very sexual. And a lot of the collections I’ve had have been on a blockbuster scale, but that’s not necessarily what I would do as a filmmaker if and when the opportunity arises. I have a romantic side that not many people know about because I don’t necessarily put it out there for people. I’m not so sure it will necessarily be a big film. It doesn’t always have to be big to be powerful; small can be very powerful. Though by small, I don’t necessarily mean small budget.”
Some may question how easy it would be for Ford, whose experience on the big screen is limited to a cameo in the fashion spoof “Zoolander,” to slip into directing. He wouldn’t be the first designer to try to make the leap. Director Joel Schumacher started out as a window dresser/costume designer. Fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi has a show on the Oxygen Network; he also wants to direct. Todd Oldham has had scripts in development but has only gotten as far as directing music videos and hosting segments on MTV’s “House of Style.”
Would Ford be able to keep his hands off the costumes in his movie? “Probably not,” he admits. “I would be very visual.”
Ford’s work for Gucci defined the sultry style of the 1990s with feather-trimmed jeans, bamboo stilettos, velvet hip-huggers and keyhole cutout jersey gowns. On Sunday night, in front of 800 guests, he’ll accept a Walk of Style Award that will literally cement his legacy as a designer into Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. But when his contract expires April 30, he will leave the crusty Italian loafer label that he helped rescue from bankruptcy and build into a
$3 billion, publicly traded global brand with a streamlined aesthetic all its own.
“I’m not sure it’s goodbye to fashion. I’m not sure of anything,” he says. Sitting on a black leather couch in a dimly lighted office at the Miauhaus Studios, he is reflective. His anger about what has happened is still raw. “I’m not sure I want to see another G for a while.”
Ford and Gucci Group President and CEO Domenico De Sole are leaving after a public battle with Gucci’s largest shareholder, Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (PPR), over the terms of their contracts, in particular managerial independence. Much of the discussion about Ford’s departure has focused on the shift in power it could portend in the fashion industry, away from art and toward commerce. Perhaps, in creating such a strong image for Gucci -- famously controlling the design of the clothes, perfumes, advertising and even store interiors -- Ford fell victim to it when PPR executives decided the brand could survive without him.
Two weeks ago, the French firm announced his successors at Gucci: a team of three relative unknowns, all designers who were hired by and worked with Ford. An unknown was also tapped for Saint Laurent. Are fashion houses destined to be run like General Mills?
“I believe it’s important to have a strong point of view for a brand, but maybe this new strategy will be incredibly successful,” says Ford. “The people who have been given these jobs are all wonderful ... I wish them the best. And I wish the company the best because it’s something that Domenico and I built.”
Saint Laurent has never been dear to him. The French did not welcome him, and indeed, neither did Saint Laurent the man, and the label has yet to turn a profit. But clearly, Ford is still working through the sense of ownership he feels for Gucci, and what the loss will mean. After all, it was his Richard Neutra house in Bel-Air that inspired the clean, horizontal lines of the Gucci stores. And Lisa Eisner, an L.A. style maven, co-founder of Greybull Press and a friend of 15 years, has been a constant source of design inspiration. Her book “Rodeo Girl” and her trove of vintage Nudie western suits inspired the spring 1998 Gucci collection, which included the much-imitated feathered jeans and the Jackie bags, revived from the 1960s, in multicolored hibiscus prints. “When he thinks about the American woman, he thinks about L.A.,” says Eisner.
Though Ford is a popular guest on the champagne and canape circuit, his close friends say he’s down to earth, at home in a multiplex at the mall or at the Vanity Fair Oscar party. “In the chaos and the demands of his life and work and responsibilities, he’s able to be present when you are with him at dinner or on a horse,” says Rita Wilson, who has been rafting in Idaho with Ford and riding with him in Santa Fe.
Producer Mitch Glaser (“Lost in Translation”), another of the designer’s friends here, believes that much of Ford’s and Gucci’s style can be traced to the duality of Los Angeles. Diaghilev, the Russian restaurant at the Bel Age Hotel, is one of Ford’s favorites. “We’ve been there with him a couple of times,” Glaser says, “and the place is a weird combination of Hollywood elegance and the new. There will be a harpist and caviar and some young actress ... the maitre d’ in the tuxedo and a hip-hop band. I think it’s what he likes about being out here -- the combination of Old Hollywood glamour and the street.”
It’s L.A.’s blend of class and crass that no doubt inspired Ford to design $10,000 fur coats alongside logo print condom cases.
Ford was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up in Santa Fe, N.M., before studying art history at NYU. He took acting classes in New York, and appeared in TV commercials for Clearasil, McDonald’s, Old Spice, LifeSavers and M&Ms;, with 12 national spots in rotation at one time. In 1982 he moved to L.A., but discovered he didn’t fit the “blond, L.A. beach” profile that casting agents were looking for. “I was always East Coast preppy,” he says. So he enrolled at Otis Parsons School of Art to study architecture, later taking classes in New York and in Paris before realizing the subject was “too serious” for him. Fashion, it turned out, was his passion. He had a few jobs in New York before signing on with Gucci in 1990. Ford points out that he was an unknown then.
The idea that there was an archive to work with is a myth, Ford says. Most of what is iconic about the brand today -- the horse bit belts, the bamboo stilettos -- he conceived. Leaving behind these signatures is “not necessarily something I wanted to do,” he says. “But as a fashion designer, you can’t get too hung up on what you’ve done in the past, because each season you leave what you did. Each season, no matter how much you love something, you have to push it away and then find something new.”.
What he will miss most, he says, is the process -- not the red carpet gowns or the lavish runway shows, like his Gucci swan song, where he was showered in pink rose petals as he took his bow. “I was thinking today, ‘This would make a great jacket.’ And I’m not going to have an outlet for that anymore. Before now, I would just draw a sketch and hand it in and make this great jacket, and I would do it daily, and not just this great jacket, this lighter, this cigarette holder, this box, this chair,” he says. “It’s a sort of constant which I won’t have anymore, and that I think I will really miss. So I have to find a new outlet for it.”
When asked to sum up his legacy, Ford answers, “Hedonism.” But that’s too easy. He is a designer and a businessman with a knack for translating the zeitgeist into wait-listed products, be it the purple lace-front peasant blouses at YSL or the iridescent patent-leather go-go boots at Gucci.
“A fashion designer’s job is to filter everything in popular culture now and get bored before the customer is bored,” he says, his voice quickening. “I flip through a magazine and say, ‘I’m sick of stilettos, I don’t want to see another stiletto,’ then I say to myself, ‘What do I want to see?’ You’re hoping that if you’re right it will look good to everyone else’s eye, because you’re consuming the same thing they’re consuming but you’re working like a sleuth to figure out what’s next. I do that every season. That’s how I start, with what I’m sick of.” Notice that he’s talking in the present tense.
For the next few months, Ford will focus on “building” his personal life with his partner of 18 years, European magazine editor Richard Buckley, and their smooth-haired fox terrier, Angus. They’ll split their time between L.A. (movies at the mall, dinners at Mr. Chow and In-N-Out Burger), the ranch in Santa Fe (“a fashion-free zone” where they ride horses, shop at Wal-Mart and eat Mexican food) and London (where they recently bought an 18th century house to restore).
Ford says, “My first thought was, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do? I have to do something new! I have to get a new office! I have to do this! I have to do that!’ But I don’t really know. I might actually be really happy doing nothing.”
Pause.
“I know,” he says. “Even I don’t believe that. But I think at least I have to take the time to make sure.”
“He’s up for the adventure,” says Eisner. “Now he can start another part of his life and not burn out like other designers do. In terms of filmmaking, I think he understands the world is very sensory.... He’s also the most willful person I’ve ever met. If he said he wanted to be president I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Perhaps in Act 3.
