WHICH fashion designer calls his mare Naomi? Tom Ford, of course. The fashion phenomenon, whose back is still recovering after Naomi took a dislike to his new Hermes sandal and threw him during a ride in his native Santa Fe recently, talks to this month’s Vogue about life since leaving the Gucci Group in April last year. Having initially expected him to break into the film world, fashion watchers all over the world were surprised when Ford, who admittedly has three film projects underway already, announced that the next time we saw him professionally would be at the launch of a beauty line with Estée Lauder. But he explains that it was a natural move. “I have remained obsessed with looking at women and men around me, seeing how far their eyes are from their forehead, and thinking if brows were thinned out it could make a face look different,” he says, adding that it drives his partner Richard Buckley crazy. “I say, ‘It’s OK for you, you can get away from me. I can’t get away from me!'” The beauty industry is also Ford’s platform until such time as he feels ready to jump back into the fashion arena once more. “When I left Gucci, my main thing was to focus on films,” he says. “But that is a slow business. I realised that if I did not design or do anything in the fashion world, then the value of my name would deteriorate. Fragrance and beauty take less time. Through just 10 meetings I have produced a collection. Plus, it’s working in fashion peripherally, it’s being involved in the look of the season and developing the contemporary idea of beauty. It keeps my name out there and, after two or three years, if I got back into fashion, the push behind the Tom Ford Estée Lauder Collection and the Tom ford brand will keep my name visible. It will be there in print advertising, commercials, on bus stops – so my name will have more value when I decide to come back.” And don’t ever expect him to stop there. “I want to dominate the world,” he continues. “I have never understood not aspiring to that.”
Source: Vogue.co.uk
Tom Ford photographed by Craig McDean for the November issue of Vogue