“I guess I’m hyper- self-conscious about people thinking that I’m egotistical, but there’s a difference between being egotistical and knowing your value as a product and an actor. “I don’t know-it’s always nice to have your picture on the cover of Vanity Fair.” He shifts in his seat. “Well, I was illustrating, in that photo,” he says. There was the clamorous cover of Vanity Fair’s “Hollywood” issue, where he was featured nibbling on the ear of a naked Keira Knightley. Plus, in the last couple of years the sex thing started to seem like too much humbuggery, uncool and oily-like Madonna after her sex book, he started to feel like a parody. Resurrecting ’77 in ’97 made sense, since fashion tends to repeat itself every twenty years, but hausfrau trends and disposable H&M styles have little communion with Ford’s view of the world. Today’s fashion is recycling the eighties, and Ford has always been about the seventies. It’s a lot to handle being a muse and a brand, especially in a time that isn’t necessarily responsive to your look. However, the Tom Ford chest hair remains in fine form, a forest of manliness barely concealed by a polo shirt, usually with merely three or four buttons undone.
He has been scrutinized for signs of a toupee, Restylane, and lifted shoes. “If you have the money, why pay someone to give you money?”Īt 45, Ford is still the only handsome male fashion designer, with perfect stubble, manicured nails, and not an ounce of fat: “When my clothes are getting tight, that’s not a sign to me that I need to go to another size-it’s a reminder that I have to stop eating, or suffer,” he explains. “It made more sense for me to own it,” he says, shrugging. With a fortune of at least $250 million from his work at Gucci, and his ex-Gucci CEO Domenico De Sole as partner, Ford owns the new company that bears his name. “There’s really nowhere in the world that my name isn’t known,” explains Ford, recently returned from a trip to Asia with Sotheby’s, where he was happy to find that young women in Shanghai still recognized him and snapped pictures with camera phones. “I mean, ‘Hello!’ Okay?” The brand will go global by 2008. Three years after leaving Gucci, he’s opened a menswear store on Madison Avenue, providing suits, shirts, shoes, perfume, eyewear, and everything else for “all the guys I know, all my friends, who can’t fucking find anything to wear,” he says. Today, Ford has moved beyond sex professionally, which has been confusing to him in a way. “I feel,” he says breathily, “that I am keyed into the female consciousness.” Women were personally bewitched by him, the straightest gay man alive: In the way that gay men dream of getting hot straight guys to play on the other team, women are enticed by Ford because his heavy-duty flirting encourages the fantasy that he could fall for you. In the ten years he helmed Gucci, and the four he designed for Yves Saint Laurent, Ford taught American women to become sexual dominants, supplying them the costume of stovepipe trousers and Halston–meets–Elsa Peretti white jersey dresses, as well as leather spankers and sterling-silver handcuffs.
One could be embarrassed by looking at Tom Ford’s package if he didn’t draw so much attention to it himself. “Men have been very crude for a long time-I mean, you walk down the street and guys scream, ‘Hey, baby!’” “Why shouldn’t women have sex for enjoyment? Why should showing off be a bad thing?” He throws one hand in the air, snarls, and reaches down to grab it. “I don’t know, I’m not sure,” he says in his flirty baritone, accented by a macho Texas twang. And on a recent afternoon, while we were talking about the ladies who also do not wear underwear-Spears, Lohan, Hilton-Ford is saying that he doesn’t necessarily think they are gauche. But Tom Ford, among other ostentatiously masculine habits, doesn’t wear underwear. It’s not every day one gets to see the penis of a sex god.