Tom Ford: ‘I paid $90000 for my own dress. The clothes we make are not meant to be thrown away’

Tom Ford 002, which spans 444 pages, includes imagery by photographers such as Mert and Marcus and Inez & Vinoodh and a foreword by Anna Wintour.

Texan-born Ford speaks to me from Beverly Hills, where he has lived since decamping from the UK in 2019.

As a designer, he remains fiercely loyal to the breed of high-octane glamour he used to transform Gucci into a billion-dollar business.

A self-confessed “hyper Virgo”, Ford has an unforgiving eye for everything from floral displays to the length of a shirt cuff.

“When Richard saw the book, he said: ‘That’s a lot of water under the bridge’ and turned and left the room,” Ford says.

He was five when it was taken, so no one would recognise him from it,” he says.

A candid Q&A with Women’s Wear Daily’s Bridget Foley is also featured.

His reluctance to take stock is a hangover from his days at Gucci, when there was no time to pause for reflection, a period that led to burnout, and he had what he has called a “mid-life crisis”.

“Cancel culture inhibits design because rather than feeling free, the tendency is to start locked into a set of rules.

Ford, the elected chair of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and perhaps, the world’s chicest environmentalist, welcomes the call for the luxury world to lessen its impact on the planet.

He is applying the same mindset to his business – Ford’s label turns over $2bn a year, while Tom Ford Beauty turns over $1bn – paying attention to details such as packaging and workers’ rights.

He tells me that he recently paid $90,000 for a dress he designed during his tenure at Yves Saint Laurent to add to his archive.

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