Tom Ford thinks about death all day, if you want to know the truth. “I look at a puppy and I think, ‘Oh my God, that puppy’s so beautiful. Oh, it’s just going to be old and die.’ And that makes that puppy even more beautiful.” He leans forward. “I like flowers. They’re beautiful. I think, ‘Well, they’re going to be dead in three or four days, but my God, aren’t they beautiful now?’ ” He leans back and exhales. “Everything’s so transient,” he says. “Everything dies.”
He sits in his office, which is nothing but shades of white, black, and stainless steel, and he thinks of death in there, too. Years ago, the thumbprints on the steel would have bothered him. Years ago, he tells me, he would have sat up straighter and made sure his suit was falling exactly right. Years ago, he gave wild interviews. He said he wanted to live in an adobe in the desert with his dog and make sculpture; he suggested, in this very magazine, that all men should be sexually penetrated, and then he maybe (definitely) propositioned his interviewer. But it’s not years ago. It’s now, and now he’s more interested in having a good talk than a wild time. He’s sober now; our interview will take no such turns. Maybe it’s age that has mellowed him—he’s 55—or maybe he just has less to prove these days, now that virtually everything he’s tried has turned out not just okay, not just successful, but singular and exquisite. He’s still a perfectionist, of course, but Tom Ford at 55 has decided that he can survive a thumbprint or two.
He has now made not one but two movies that are devastating and beautiful to watch. First there was 2009’s A Single Man, a quiet and gorgeous film about a man in mourning for his partner. Now Nocturnal Animals, which on its surface seems like a story of revenge. But if you look harder, Ford says, it’s about something more elemental than that—something more nouveau Tom Ford than that: “It’s a movie about finding the people in your life that mean something and not letting them get away.” He speaks from his diaphragm, his voice aspirating out deeply like the last part of a breath. He waves his hands around like a traffic cop in a music video—stop, now go go go—but then he makes it his own with a graceful wristy flourish at the end. “That’s the whole point of it.”
In 2011, on a friend’s recommendation, Ford read the book that Nocturnal Animals is based upon and he bought the rights immediately, even though he didn’t know what he’d do with it. He put it into one of the art galleries in the back of his mind, letting it incubate. That’s how he works. Three years later, when he was finally ready to write the screenplay, it took only six weeks. It’s the story of an art dealer in Los Angeles whose ex-husband sends her a copy of the novel he finally wrote—the one he says she inspired. The movie goes back and forth between her story and the story in the novel—a violent, unsettling allegory about their own lost love—until they align in a way that still had me thinking about it more than a week after I saw it.
Tom Ford has much to lose. He’s always had a lot to lose. He’s been with his husband, Richard Buckley, for more than 30 years. He has a successful career as a fashion designer for his own house after leaving a successful career as a fashion designer for other houses (upstarts Gucci and Saint Laurent). For a certain generation of cool people—Jay Z and Russell Westbrook, to name a few—a crisp and perfect Tom Ford suit is still the gold standard. But now he has a 4-year-old son, Jack, and maybe in one small way he’s just as boring as the rest of us: the way we only start considering all we have when our hearts reach a tipping point. So he has work to do.
“I look at my son and he’s so happy and joyful and I say, ‘Richard, it’s because he hasn’t learned the secret yet. And the secret is that he’s going to die.’ ” This focuses him, reminds him he has only a short amount of time to create new worlds. “Jack doesn’t yet feel the pain that humans, all of us, feel and will feel.” It puts you in a mind to think about those things—the urgency of existence coming down on you like a foot on your throat.
Tom Ford takes the first of his three to five daily power baths at 6 A.M., rising before Richard and Jack, in order to rouse himself from the sleeping pills that have made him nearly comatose. He sits in the bath with his eyes closed, sipping iced coffee through a straw like he’s in the ICU being brought back from anesthetized abyss. He helps Jack dress, and he allows Jack to pick his own clothes. Granted, the only clothes Jack owns are clothes that Tom Ford, who is his father, has pre-selected for him; he has little access to items that his father finds unacceptable. So Jack wears his Lacoste shirt and his jeans, and he tops off the look with Velcro Stan Smiths. He’s just gotten out of a phase in which the only color he would wear was camel—“Camel, camel, camel, camel,” Ford grouses, “all he wanted was camel”—a monochrome 2-year-old. Now all he wants to wear is black. “Jack,” his father tells him, “black doesn’t really look good on little children. You need to wear some color.” Grudgingly, the toddler says, “Okay, gray.” Ford throws up his hands and retrieves some gray.
A sore subject in the Ford household: Jack has some light-up dinosaur shoes, and sometimes he tries to wear them to school, and when Ford catches him doing this, he has to step in. “What does Dada say about the dinosaur shoes?” “They’re tacky.” “And when are we allowed to wear them?” “On weekends.” And so the Velcro Stan Smiths go back on Jack’s feet while he looks achingly at his light-ups, counting the days until they can have their brief, private, unphotographed moment in the sun.
Meanwhile, his father is dressed today in what all fathers wear to work: a jillion-dollar suit with a white shirt open to the navel, so that all who face him will be greeted with a gift bouquet of chest hair. “Are you going out later?” I ask, foolishly. Ford says no, then shakes his head no, then says no again, clearly perplexed. “This is a daytime suit.”
(It gets worse: At one point, I asked Tom Ford if he owns sweatpants, and that did not go over well. He looked hard at me, trying to ascertain if I was kidding, and furrowed his brow; he has a great dermatologist and despite some filler and some Botox, he has a full range of movement in his face. I looked at him with wide eyes and an expectant smile, and once he determined that I was serious, he said no in a way that made me not follow up, then also “I mean, really, no” and “No, absolutely not.” But Tom Ford is kind and doesn’t want me to have a bad experience during this interview, and so he concedes that he’s a member of a tennis club in London that only permits its members to wear white, and yes, sometimes he does get into the car in this one pair of white sweatpants, since it’s required, but no one on the street sees him because his driver pulls him right up to the club. This seamlessly transitions into a conversation about how men should never ever wear shorts unless they are within very close proximity to a pool, but literally like the deck of the pool, not the eating area. In the eating area, you pull yourself together and put on some pants, for Christ’s sake—you’re eating. “It’s a very American thing—that weird thing where you go to the Hamptons and people are in shorts, loafers, and blazers. No.”)
By the time he arrives at work—though when Tom Ford is Tom Ford’s brand, Tom Ford never really leaves work—he puts death to the back of his mind, though not so far back that it is disconnected from his life now. He is known for his meticulousness, and that meticulousness has paid off with a quality of experience down every vertical he has: Roni Brunn, a fashion designer, was familiar with the general excellence of a Tom Ford product. When she heard he'd entered the cosmetics space, she perhaps took a deep breath at the $80 tag for an eye shadow—but then she tried it, and she thought, “Fuck you, Tom Ford, this stays on all day!” He’d done something no one else had bothered to do with eye shadow, which is to make it not just a different color, but a better product; Brunn says he’s the Elon Musk of film and fashion. His clothing is indestructible and timeless—not classic, because even classics go in and out, whereas Tom Ford pieces can be worn forever. It’s vintage from day one.
This is Tom Ford considering your experience. The eye shadow should last longer. The clothing should be wearable immediately, but also forever. The movie should be so riveting that you can’t look away from it long enough to check your phone. Everything must hold up under the pressure of now. Is it perfect right now, in the moment you need it?
Tom Ford begins Nocturnal Animals with a montage of fat naked women dancing. He’s sad that one reviewer saw this as fat-shaming, and whether that reviewer is right is something you can discuss among yourselves once you’ve seen the film. For what it’s worth, he says the actresses laughed throughout filming and that he’s never seen people so happy and free.
“We had so much fun that day,” he says. “And when I watched the film, I was just struck by the beauty of it, by the beauty of them and by their energy. I just love that sequence. They are the representation of people who have let go of what society says you’re supposed to be. And what are they? Joyful. And what is Susan”—the film’s protagonist, played by Amy Adams—“who’s being everything society says she should be? Miserable.”
When the film begins, Susan, a Los Angeles art dealer, receives a galley for a novel from her first husband, played by Jake Gyllenhaal. The action of the movie toggles between lonely shots of Susan’s life while her current husband is away and the plot of her ex-husband’s novel as she reads it. The juxtaposition between the two—a civilized, art-directed life in the Hollywood Hills versus a chaotic, violent one in remote West Texas—is disparate enough that it’s hard to believe both settings can coexist in one movie. There are many ways that Ford excels as a moviemaker, but already his most unique talent is how well he occupies both worlds—the sad and cold one, and the hot and vile one.
He set the movie in Los Angeles because that’s where he wants to be right now. Jack is enrolled here for the school year. The alternative was London, but the whole reason he got an office here in L.A. was so he could make movies. He doesn’t have a place in New York anymore. New York is over, as far as he’s concerned. “I find New York too frenetic,” he says. “I mean, I have to take Valium when I’m in New York, and the energy doesn’t seem focused at anything because everything’s so difficult. You get back at the end of the day and you feel like this. And you think, ‘Oh God, I did this and I did that, but what did I really do? I went downtown. That was exhausting.’ ”
The Buckley-Fords live in a Richard Neutra house built in 1955, but Ford feels as if he’s existing in an era even further gone. “I live in the Hollywood of the 1930s. I don’t actually live in the Hollywood of 2016,” he says, and that’s how he copes with the fact that L.A. is a harder city for style, in that so few people have it. As Ford puts it: “Here is the city of Los Angeles”—he holds his hands up, one above the other, about two feet apart—“and above them is an oil slick. The oil slick are the interesting, smart, intelligent people who are stylish, who you could have a conversation with, who’d want to be friends. Then”—and here he indicates the rest of the space—“you have morons.”
L.A. in toto is hard on the basis of the faces alone. Ford wants to look at interesting faces, and often that is difficult in Los Angeles because so many women here make their faces monuments to their old faces. He just wants to see a decent expression sometimes, you know? You can’t find a decent expression below the oil slick.
But other than that, he likes L.A. He likes the ocean and the trees and the sky. If you focus on those things, it’s easier to cope. He is not who the world thinks he is, really. “People see billboards with my face on it, [then] they come to meet me and I feel like they’re expecting the real-life Kate Moss to be lying across the table naked and somebody would be doing lines of coke and whoo! Just going everywhere and everything just so wow.” In reality, though, he just wants to go home and put on his evening suit—or whatever the opposite of sweatpants is—and watch an episode of something with Richard.
He sighs. This has been quite a talk. I tell him it had a lot to live up to, considering his last GQ interview—the one during which he propositioned the (heterosexual male) writer. I had no such expectations, but, well, does he stand by what he said? That every man should be penetrated? He sighs again. He doesn’t want to get into all of that. “I was just taking the piss out of him,” he says, adding that he read the article through his fingers when it came out, the whole time wondering, “Oh God, what was I thinking?” He was drunk, he says. He didn’t mean it, he says. Okay, he did mean it, he says, but he shouldn’t have said it.
But Tom Ford is still in there, so he can’t stop himself. So he says this next thing, and it doesn’t come off as lascivious, the way it might have years ago, but thoughtful and aware: Yes, he says, all men should be penetrated at some point. And not as in emotions. He means: All men should be fucked. “I think it would help them understand women,” he argues. “It’s such a vulnerable position to be in, and it’s such a passive position to be in. And there’s such an invasion, in a way, that even if it’s consensual, it’s just very personal. And I think there’s a psyche that happens because of it that makes you understand and appreciate what women go through their whole life, because it’s not just sexual, it’s a complete setup of the way the world works, that one sex has the ability to literally—and is expected to and is wanted to—but also there’s an invasion. And I think that that’s something most men do not understand at all.”
But he doesn’t like that we’re talking about this. He asks if I’m going to include it in my article, and when I say yes, of course, he closes his eyes. He has a son now. He doesn’t want him reading this kind of stuff from his father. But he also understands, as though he wishes he hadn’t said it but doesn’t exactly regret it, because in the end, Tom Ford wants your experience of Tom Ford to be authentically Tom Ford. It is not easy to have his particular particularities and to exist among us regular people, in our shorts/loafers combinations, in our sweatpants and dinosaur sneakers. He is teaching us how to be perfect. When will we finally catch on?
Someone once told Ford that the Chinese say to always leave something undone, because the moment you’re done with your life’s work, you’re done with life. Tom Ford’s cure for that is never thinking anything is perfect. But it’s only a temporary cure, and he knows it. Which is why, in a Tom Ford movie, the moment the protagonist accomplishes his goals, he dies.
This piece originally appeared in the December 2016 issue with the title "Tom Ford's Wild Kingdom."
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