Tom Ford

Fashion Design   Apparel Definition

Architecture, Parsons and Two Apprenticeships

Ford's preparation repeats a pattern among strong designers: he initially studied architecture before graduating from the Parsons School of Design in 1986. Architecture teaches composition at scale — how a whole composition is organised, where the eye enters, what is emphasised and what is plain — and those are the skills of a creative director even more than of a pattern cutter. His first design jobs were with Cathy Hardwick and Perry Ellis, two American sportswear names, which gave him the commercial American grounding that European couture designers often lack: how clothes sell, in stores, to customers who are not fashion insiders. When Gucci's creative director Dawn Mello recruited him in 1990 to design women's ready-to-wear, he arrived as an American with an architect's eye inside a storied but failing Italian house.

The Gucci Turnaround

The result is the most quoted business fact in modern fashion: by 1999 Ford had brought Gucci from an almost bankrupt business to a fashion power worth 4.3 billion dollars. He moved from designing women's ready-to-wear to become the company's chief director — in effect its creative director across the whole brand. A turnaround of that size is never only about clothes. It requires one person's taste to govern everything the customer sees — collections, advertising, stores, packaging — so that the brand speaks in a single voice, and Ford's architectural training suited him exactly for that total-design role. The Gucci he rebuilt was glamorous, sharp and unmistakably of its moment, and its commercial value multiplied because the image and the product were finally the same thing. Designers are often credited with revivals; Ford's is measurable in a valuation.

Two Houses, Then an Exit

When Gucci acquired the house of Yves Saint Laurent, Ford was named creative director of that label as well, while Yves Saint Laurent himself designed the haute couture collection. One creative director governing two of fashion's great names at once was unprecedented in scale, and it made Ford the defining designer-executive of his period. In 2004 he stepped down from both positions, with talks about wanting to direct films. The departure, like Helmut Lang's and Jil Sander's departures from group-owned labels in the same era, marked the limit of the model: the designer creates the value, the group owns it, and the partnership lasts only while both sides agree on its direction.

Two personal details complete the portrait. Ford's partner of nearly two decades was Richard Buckley, a fashion and style journalist who resigned on February 4, 2005 as editor in chief of Vogue Hommes International — a partnership joining the designing and the writing sides of fashion in one household. And his noted interest in modern architecture came full circle in the houses he commissioned from the Spanish architect Alberto Campo Baeza and the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The student who left architecture for fashion ended by hiring two of its masters: the discipline he abandoned remained the framework through which he organised brands, images and, eventually, his own homes.