Fashion gay man

To observe that gay men and lesbians dominate the fashion business may seem about as controversial as saying that Russians rule Moscow. But with a few exceptions (Todd Oldham, Isaac Mizrahi), the ranks of top designers who are publicly out of the closet are surprisingly thin. The standard explanation for this situation has to do with that elusive, transitory quality that defines fashion's nature: image. To succeed, a designer needs an image that is not only strong but also flexible, and to proclaim too publicly that one is gay (or straight, for that matter), while politically correct, may be philosophically limiting--especially, as with Gucci's Tom Ford, when your design philosophy is based on the notion that fashion's sexual force field should be fluid. "There's not such a hard line anymore between gay and straight," the 35-year-old Texan announces during an interview at New York City's Carlyle Hotel. Fashion is "not about what works for men and what works for women," the designer continues. "It's about a look of the moment."

Over the past three years, Ford has again and again captured the moment with his work. He is recognized by fashion critics as one of the three most influential designers of the mid 1990s, and it is no accident that the other two--Helmut Lang and Miuccia Prada--also blur boundaries relating to sex. The sensuality of Ford's designs, however, is the most overt of the group's. The come-hither shine of his men's and women's ready-to-wear collections, combined with his fresh eye and marketing savvy, has propelled the Italian luxury-goods company Gucci to a remarkable renaissance. "It has been his mandate to create an image for the house that is both arresting and commercial and he has done so, brilliantly, trumpeted the fashion bible Women's Wear Daily after Ford's fall 1997 women's collection was shown this past March in Milan. Ford, who has been at Gucci since 1990 and has been its worldwide creative director since 1994, has taken a company whose signature leather loafers and handbags had come to appeal primarily to your aunt in Amarillo and turned it into a source of body-baring chic for models and movie stars.

Ford's arrival in the awareness of gay men and lesbians started with his 1995 ready-to-wear collections, which featured hip-hugging pants and form-revealing shirts, a look that said both '50s gigolo and '70s nightclubber. (The designer's early days hanging out at Studio 54, while he was an undergraduate at New York University, have had an incalculable effect on his work.) But Ford designs much more than the high-style clothing that has received all the press attention. "He is responsible for many product categories, from men's and ladies' ready-to-wear to accessories and gifts," says Domenico De Sole, chief executive officer of the Gucci Group. "That kind of responsibility takes an extremely talented and focused person." The Ford-focused renovation, which has occurred amid tremendous mid-'90s growth in the luxury-goods market, has led not only to Gucci's growing consumer popularity (according to one industry report, the company's worldwide sales may top $1 billion this year, up from $881 million in 1996) but also to a higher philanthropic profile, including involvement in charity events such as the annual fashion gala for AIDS Project Los Angeles, which this year will include a Gucci-backed cocktail party and dinner as well as a fashion show honoring Ford.

During the interview at the Carlyle, where Ford was dressed in dark threads and a mid-length leather jacket, he spoke about his success and, for the first time, his private life. Rumor has it that the designer's good fortune has made his manner increasingly grand and that his good looks--which in his early 20s won him work as an actor on television commercials and which have made him, according to one well-known fashion editor, "just about the only big-name designer you might want to fuck"--have begun to fade. Instead a still very attractive man with a dark receding hairline and useful amounts of fashion-biz glibness emerged. Ford can be refreshingly frank while continually reserving the right to change his mind when it comes to self-description.

About sexual preference, for instance. Given the fact that gay people dominate his business, Ford says he finds it ironic that "everyone in the fashion industry dances around questions of sexuality." He insists that he has never lied about the question, at least not lately. "In interviews no one ever asks me these questions," he says. "Usually it's about `Why did you do this shoe?'" Although Ford admits he had an identity-consolidating period in his 20s when he was so immersed in gay culture that he had few women friends, he says that gay is no longer one of the first words he would use to describe himself. Nonetheless, he seems both proud and matter-of-fact when he says, "I'm certainly gay at this particular moment in my life." That moment has lasted awhile: He's been with his boyfriend, fashion writer Richard Buckley, for ten years. Citing privacy, he says little about Buckley except that he's "a great cook" and that the couple is "very happy" together. "Maybe when I'm 60, " Ford says, "I'm going to live with a woman and have kids. I don't know. When I was 15 I went out with a woman--for several years, actually. I was completely happy then too."

Ford isn't particularly concerned that these comments may not please those who see sexual orientation as fixed rather than fluid. "At some point the whole label of gay or straight will completely disappear," he predicts. "And it will be, `Are you with a man or with a woman?' "Ford isn't arguing for androgyny here. "I hate that word," he says, "because androgyny implies sexlessness, and I'm all for--and have built my career on--clothes that are sexy."

Ironically, however, it's a sexiness derived from gender fluidity that Ford puts on the runway and in advertisements. One of the images in Gucci's current men's ready-to-wear campaign, for example, features a faunlike male sporting Tammy Faye--like amounts of eye shadow. Comments Ford: "Often I get the question, `Why do you put makeup on guys? Are they trying to be more feminine?' or `Why are you showing masculine suits on women?' I hate those two words, feminine and masculine. I mean, what are they? Why is a suit masculine and not feminine? And why is eye makeup feminine and not masculine? It's so stupid. We're just people. The guy has eye makeup on so he's more beautiful." The more we hold on to rigid notions of gender and attractiveness, Ford's work suggests, the more such notions keep constraining us. Playing with gender expectations, the designer says, can be sexy: "In their fantasies people are sometimes turned on by `soft' men and `hard' women, so fashion should be able to reflect that." Ford's most recent women's wear show illustrates this view. The fall collection features `80s-inflected leather suits with armorlike shoulders and killer high heels, a silhouette by which Ford not only celebrates feminine forcefulness but also holds a mirror to what he sees as today's "very violent" beauty ideal. "Powerful women exuding a hint of aggression can be a real turn-on," he says. "You don't have to be a dominatrix to know that."

Although Ford celebrates sexual fluidity on the runway, he recognizes the advantages that someone who is securely gay in real life can bring to design--in other words, why he and other gay designers continue to have such an impact on fashion. First, they have been largely responsible for the eroticization that has transformed the male image and men's fashion during the past two decades. "A man becoming a sex object opened a whole new door," Ford says. "If you have a group of people who are assembling images for the world and they're predominantly gay, once they found they could get away with pushing images that possibly appealed more to themselves sexually, then the door was wide open." Second, Ford observes, gay designers may actually have an advantage dressing women. While female designers, as Donna Karan and others have shown, have a more intuitive sense of how clothing feels on a woman, gay men, Ford says, may have a stronger sense of how it appears on her: "You can be slightly more objective about what looks good on a woman, at least in terms of drape and fit."