The Fantastic Mr. Ford: A Personal History Of The Designer Who Does It All

Tom Ford—fashion designer and film director, sex symbol and family man—has made a career of upending expectations. Take his revival of Gucci, one of the great fashion success stories of our era. The Florentine leather goods company, which was founded in 1921 and later expanded into accessories and clothing, had been a favorite of the jet set and Hollywood elite from the 1950s through the 1970s. But the brand was close to insolvency when the Texas-born Ford took over as creative director in 1994. Coming off the early ’90s recession and the AIDS crisis, anti-fashion was all the rage: Remember the waif, the grunge look, deconstruction, and heroin chic? Ford, then 33, rifled through the company’s archives (“a single cardboard box,” as he later recalled) and through his own memories, conjuring images of sexed-up glamour from a few misbegotten years he spent running around in New York: Warhol and the Factory, Halston and his girls (“the Halstonettes”), living it up in the late ’70s at Studio 54. Read more at Maxim.