Is Tom Ford Saying Farewell to Style?
The garments themselves have been the least of the matter. They have been a tour by way of Mr. Ford’s favourite Tom Fordisms: the white, jersey goddess robe; the leopard, sequined lounge go well with; the lace-and-velvet L.B.D.; the smoking; the crystal pasties. There was fringe and snakeskin and the occasional breastplate — the potent mixture of intercourse and energy and self-aware shtick that emerged from Halston and Saint Laurent antecedents and outlined his aesthetic.
That’s OK, provided that the garments themselves (at the least the ladies’s put on) usually appeared the least of the matter when it got here to Tom Ford-the-brand. They have been extra like an epilogue to his Gucci-YSL years, biking by way of a few of the best hits, hitting them with a dose of Botox to iron out the wrinkles after which juicing them with glitz and athleisure — and glitzy athleisure — to make them related to a social media, pandemic world. TF-the-brand was powered extra by magnificence and perfume than style (that’s why Lauder purchased it, versus, say, Kering) and the power of Mr. Ford’s means to promote the vaporous promise contained inside.
Again within the day, when Mr. Ford began Act II of his post-Gucci style, he held his debut TF present in his first retailer on Madison Avenue and forbade smartphones and all photographers besides Terry Richardson. (It was 2010; Mr. Richardson hadn’t been canceled but.) Solely 100 individuals have been invited, they usually have been squeezed into little gold ballroom chairs.
The fashions — all of them girls who impressed Mr. Ford, like Rita Wilson, Beyoncé and Gigi Hadid — have been so shut that their garments virtually brushed everybody’s knees. The purpose being, Mr. Ford stated on the time, to make it private. “I don’t perceive everybody’s have to see the whole lot on-line the day after a present,” he instructed Vogue. He had returned to supply one thing else.
From the vantage level of now, it seems to be as if Mr. Ford have been Don Quixote, tilting at these windmills. That’s the message the ultimate movies appear to convey, anyway: a cri de coeur in regards to the altering style world and the standing of girls, with the designer at a take away, trying in at a scene taking part in out in a cage of its personal making, now not within the struggle. The ladies behind the glass don’t look glad; they give the impression of being pent-up and addled and upset.
Karen Elson sings an aria; Amber Valletta is in tears. The requiem appears not for Mr. Ford however for the tip of the world as he knew it. Or dreamed it. He leaves it fading not into the sundown, however into the darkness.