Ford designing script of his new life
Tom Ford’s new office in the former Geffen Records building on Sunset Boulevard is slick with the aesthetic that made Gucci. The black lacquer coffee table is polished to plate-glass perfection, and the black couches are linear and spotless. Ford is fresh off the plane from pheasant hunting in Canada.
His host was Lawrence Stroll, the entrepreneur who bankrolls Michael Kors, among other brands. Could their visit hint at a return to fashion for Ford, 43, who left Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent five months ago?
Not in the short term.
For now, he’s working on the next phase of his life in Hollywood. He has an agent, a newly restored Aston Martin and projects “in development,” as they say, which he hopes to direct. And yet still he seems restless.
“I should be able to relax and enjoy what I have,” says Ford, dressed in dark gray trousers, a chocolate brown velvet blazer and turtleneck sweater -- all Gucci.
But for the next few weeks, his job is promoting his new book, titled simply “Tom Ford.” The 304-page, black-bound tome is full of the flesh and flash of his decade in design, including photos of his houses in Santa Fe and Los Angeles that have never been published, as well as paparazzi, celebrity and advertising shots.
“It was something I was thinking of doing even at Gucci because it was going to be 10 years that I was creative director and I wanted to document that,” he says. “Then last October, when I realized my time at Gucci Group was limited and my time as a fashion designer might be finite, it became even more important.
“At the time, I never thought I would go back into fashion -- now, I’m not so sure -- so it became a document. Also, selfishly, I wanted to own what I had done,” he says, sipping a Diet Coke. “I gave an enormous amount of my own personality to Gucci, not only in terms of fashion but architecture and furniture, and I wanted to make sure I took that with me.”
Ford won’t talk in detail about the Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent collections shown recently in Paris and Milan, the first designed by his successors. “Of course I have opinions, but I’m no longer there, so it’s not really fair,” he says. “I didn’t think I was going to want to see what they were doing, but I did. The moment I knew the show was over, I was online looking because I was very curious. But I’m liking not being in fashion right now.”
Not that his star power doesn’t still have pull. Ford says he’s recognized now more than ever, including recently by a customs agent at the airport. And at a book signing this month in New York, a fan asked him to autograph her cleavage. But after he wraps up his book tour in London next month, he says he will be ready to “go silent for a while” and spend time at the 1955 Richard Neutra house in Bel-Air that he shares with his partner, Vogue Hommes editor Richard Buckley.
Although he read more than 100 scripts over the summer, nothing was quite right. So, ever the perfectionist, Ford is working on his own. He has two projects in the works, including a script being adapted from a book he won’t name. The second screenplay he’s writing himself.
“I am really hoping to get one of those moving, although my agent says I need to just chill. It’s not going to happen just like that. That I’ve even identified two things that I would be willing to spend the next three years of my life on is a great thing.”
He’s also trying to get used to a slower pace. “It shouldn’t be, ‘That’s not right, that’s not right, got to fix that.’ But as a designer, that’s what you do, you fix things every six months, striving always to get to a weird unattainable perfection. I tend to apply all that to my life, and that’s bad. So I’m trying really to live in the present and be happy.”
As for the kind of movie he’d like to make, Ford says: “It has to be something that makes you think or question, or remind you of something that’s beautiful in life. There needs to be a point. I’m fascinated when our instincts as humans, as animals, are at odds with what society tells us we should be doing. I want the audience to feel challenged, to feel at the beginning of the story that the situation is almost grotesque. But then when they see it through the eyes of the characters, they come to rethink....
“The ending I don’t know about,” he says. “But we’ll see.”
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Tom Ford book signing
Where: Barneys New York,
main floor, 9570 Wilshire Blvd.,
Beverly Hills
When: 6 to 8 tonight
Contact: (310) 276-4400
