In honor of our Tom Ford sunglass trunk that has just arrived in TW&Co Jewelry, we decided to share a little info on the man, the myth, the legend himself.
“Fashion’s boldest, most audacious success story ever” is how Bridget Foley of Women’s Wear Daily described the meteoric rise of Tom Ford. The true story of how this architecture graduate from Santa Fe, New Mexico, talked his way into his first design job (with no experience), and, after only a few years, took command of the prestigious (yet cash-strapped) house of Gucci, and then, in less than a decade, rose to the very top of the fashion establishment, puts Ford in a league of his own. And that’s not even taking into account the tidal wave of critical acclaim, the courting by Hollywood movie stars, and the monster profits.
Ford’s highly sexualized take on sixties and seventies silhouettes has been, in part, responsible for his astounding success. But there’s more to him than just a visionary designer. He is also a charismatic salesman, a ruthless brand executive, an innovative art director, and a canny marketing guru . . . all rolled into one. And it was precisely this skill for multitasking, as well as a meticulous attention to detail—and, let’s face it, a clear case of control-freakism—that set Gucci (and later the Tom Ford brand) on its path to world domination. As the writer Sarah Mower pointed out in Vogue, by the end of his tenure at Gucci in 2004 Ford was “designing fifteen men’s and women’s Gucci and YSL collections a year” as well as overseeing their advertising campaigns and filling the role of “corporate titan” who had masterminded the purchases of YSL, Balenciaga, and Bottega Veneta, and forged partnerships with Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney.
Dawn Mello, who first hired him in 1990 to work on womenswear at Gucci, recognized Ford as a prodigiously quick study. “He has a knack for seeing the whole thing together, not just the clothes,” she told Vogue in 1995. “I remember when we were looking for a menswear designer and Tom said, ‘Let me give it a shot,’ and I told him he had no experience in that area, but he just figured it out.”
Everything we think of when we think of Tom Ford—the high-impact runways shows, the lavish flagship stores, the notoriously risqué ad campaigns, even the film A Single Man, his stunning debut as a director—has an uncanny way of conveying the same three core themes: sex, power, and divine decadence.
“I don’t think I have ever worked with anyone with a greater passion for detail or a clearer vision of his aesthetic goals,” Anna Wintour, Vogue’s editor in chief, wrote after he sat as her cochair for the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute gala in 2003. “As somebody disposed to my own brand of perfectionism, it was an unfamiliar experience to be outdone by a man whose persistence and exactitude puts my own to shame. Tom Ford, I realized, was the Flaubert of fashion.”
Stop in to shop all of our brand new Tom Ford sunglasses just in time for summer. Hurry, this is a limited time trunk show and we guarantee these styles will go quick! See you soon!
[Information for this post was provided by Voguepedia.]
