Tom Ford

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Really since I had my son—I suppose this sounds like a cliché—I’ve become much more aware of the fact that I’m really just a link in the chain. You become aware of the world in a different way. I started by hearing an actor on a talk show talking about how plastic straws were destroying our planet. I remember thinking, “Well, that’s just crazy. Plastic straws? How could that be?” Well, once I did some research, I found out, wow, okay. That’s actually real. The number of plastic straws that are generated, what they do to our planet. And the first thing I did was switch to metal straws, and that then really has spilled over to the fact that we don’t use any single-use plastics in our house, we don’t use any plastic wrap, we use all of our water in cans. My first film, A Single Man , was highly personal. I grafted my personality onto that of Christopher Isherwood, because I took certain themes of the original book, and then blew them up so they became the principal message behind the film. Alexei Hay I’d love to talk about your films. You mentioned that you have a cinematic project that you would be interested in bringing to life. I’m not sure if you can talk at all about what that might be. More broadly, I’m curious about the types of stories you are looking to tell.

I’ve worked on it during COVID. The way I work on everything is somewhat intuitive. I literally had thousands and thousands of images, and I had everyone in my office print them up, so I had boxes and boxes and boxes of pictures, because while I look at things online—I live online like a lot of us do—photographs, for some reason, I need to see printed out. I just went through them. I did it very fast. Anything that grabbed my eye, I would throw into the pile that made it in. But I think it’s very important, whatever story you tell—or at least it is for me—that you’re able to make it personal. Otherwise, why are you telling the story? It has to be something that speaks to you. By the way, that is not so different from what resonates in fashion. You have to be true to yourself. You can’t fake it. You can’t make something because you think it was the right thing to make at a certain time and not really believe in it. Then, it doesn’t resonate with the customer or with the person looking at it.Yeah, I guess I was pleasantly surprised at how much work I had done. How did I actually, you know, do menswear, womenswear, build stores all over the world, create a cosmetics business? You work and you work and you work. It made me feel good. I actually have built a brand. This was something I wanted to do and I did it and achieved it. It made me feel good. How have you managed to be so productive? I talk about that a lot in the book. I didn’t stop drinking until well into the development of my own brand. I continued with that. In fact it probably got even worse. When I was an alcoholic, well, I guess I still am an alcoholic, but when I drank I was a highly productive alcoholic; it didn’t hinder my work until maybe right at the end. That was one of the reasons I needed to stop.

I did the same with Nocturnal Animals. Amy Adams’s character was very, very different in the book. In a sense, she became my alter ego in that film. I highlighted a thing I’ve struggled with in life, which is materialism over the importance of the people in your life. I think whatever you make as a filmmaker, those are the things that resonate. When I started working on the book, my company was 15 and I was turning 60. It was interesting, because I could so easily remember everything that was happening to me at that time in my life. I look at a dress or a piece of menswear or a photograph and think, “Oh yeah, I was living there, I was doing this. That’s why I designed this. This is what was going on in my personal life, this was what was going on in my business life.” … So it was very cathartic and reflective.

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The special collection of photographs comes just in time for the holidays, as the perfect gift for any synonymous fashion lover and Ford fan." CRFASHIONBOOK.COM Well, yes, that would be one of them. So was there a moment of epiphany when you pivoted on that aspect of your life?