Tom Ford: ‘Our culture is more comfortable with the objectification of women’
Personally, I love Tom Ford as a celebrity and personality. I feel like he’s old-school, a throwback to another generation, another era. I love his exquisite bitchiness about flip-flops in the city, and that he’s trying to ingrain a sense of what is and is not tacky with his young son. But it’s nice to remember that Tom Ford actually knows a sh-t-ton about fashion, the history of fashion and what’s happening now in fashion. Which is the reason for his new interview in The Cut. Tom talks to The Cut about his new collection, why eveningwear is where it’s at, and how all of these young designers are copying sh-t he was doing in the ‘90s. Bless. Some highlights:
How he smells: He smells “like walking potpourri. I spray on one and then an hour later I spray another. I just do it all day long.”
He’s going all-in on eveningwear: “What are day clothes today? Yoga pants. But for evening? Boom. Red carpet, cocktail dresses, mega.”
Homogenized fashion: “I’m not taking credit for it, but when I was at Gucci, that was the first wave of globalization and I jumped on it and then everyone else did. It was the first time that your customer in Tokyo wanted to wear the same thing at the same time as your customer in New York and your customer in L.A. and in London. Now every airport in the world’s got the same chains of makeup brands. We’re one culture now, globally homogenized, except for the conservatives and the three levels of prudishness.
American prudes: “Oh my God, we’ve gotten so prudish. We’ve gone in reverse. It’s so weird….It’s strange, because it goes both ways. In advertising we’ve become so prudish, and I think that comes from a fear that half our population in America is rejecting something, and that affects our business, and I think that’s where we come from… There’s a real tightening in America. When we’d shoot an ad campaign, we used to shoot for the world, and then we’d shoot a Middle East version because there are certain rules, like a man can’t touch a woman and everyone has to be clothed. But now we shoot three versions: We shoot the world version, the conservative version, and the Middle East version. The conservative version is for America.
He’s done with explicit sexual imagery? “The sex thing’s a little bit old at this point. Been there, done that. I don’t want to sound too businesslike here, but it’s all about breaking through the clutter… You can’t look like anyone else, and so I suppose I’ve been more romantic lately. More sensual than sexual because that’s all quite easy at this point. I’ve done the G-spot. I’ve put the perfume there. I get the criticism, I see it in my press reports, all complaining about the objectification of women. I’ve objectified men just as much in my career, but you just cannot run those images. I put that perfume bottle between a woman’s breasts, but I also put it between a guy’s butt cheeks, but [few] would accept that because our culture is more comfortable with the objectification of women to sell products than it is with the objectification of men to sell products. I’m for equal-opportunity objectification.
The Amy Adams character in Nocturnal Animals: “Of course the most important thing in life is the people you connect with. The woman in Nocturnal Animals is a victim of our culture, a victim of her own upbringing and her own insecurity, really. I wanted to set the film in that very glamorous-on-the-surface, perfect world. And by the way, the character was very autobiographical.
Why he’s showing in New York: “I have a very defined customer and a very defined look. I’m seeing a lot of collections I did in the ’90s referenced by other designers, and I look at that and I say, “How interesting, maybe I should remember what it was that I was all about and go back.” That’s what this September’s show will be about. I hope that I’m returning to what I’ve always believed in, but in a new way. You will always have moments when you are more in fashion and less in fashion, and if you don’t stay true to yourself, you will lose your way. Hopefully I will look like what I’ve always looked like.
[From The Cut]
I actually liked Nocturnal Animals and I don’t want to femsplain (womsplain?) his movie to him, but I actually don’t think the Amy Adams character was a victim of culture or whatever. I thought she made the right choice to (spoiler?) dump Jake Gyllenhaal’s character when they were young. Maybe she shouldn’t have gotten with Armie Hammer, but still. Jake’s character was so spineless and too sensitive for his own good. The story-within-the-story has him as weak and spineless too. I hated both versions of Jake.
As for the rest of it… so much subtle shade. “I’m seeing a lot of collections I did in the ’90s referenced by other designers…” Tom Ford sees you, designers. He also sees all of you ad geniuses trying to come up with more and more daring advertising and he thinks it’s passé.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
Source: Tom Ford: ‘Our culture is more comfortable with the objectification of women’
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