Tom Ford

Tom Ford is a celebrity designer in every sense of the word – a celebrity persona in his own right who has dressed many of Hollywood's biggest names for red carpet events. Throughout his career his aesthetic is consistently rooted in luxe minimalism inspired by 1970s hedonistic glamour which extends to his highly sexualized advertisements. Lisa Eisner and Carine Roitfeld are his longtime muses.

Born on August 27, 1961 and raised in Texas and New Mexico, Ford moved to New York to attend New York University in 1979, and graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1986. He was hired as design director at Perry Ellis in 1988, but left in 1990 to join Gucci as their womenswear designer.

In 1992, he was promoted to design director of all the company’s divisions and was named creative director in 1994 after Maurizio Gucci left the company. By 1996, Gucci was a publicly traded company run by Domenico De Sole as president and CEO and Ford as vice-chairman and creative director. After a failed takeover attempt in 1999 by luxury conglomerate LVMH, Ford and De Sole allied with François Pinault, who acquired a substantial stake in the company, providing Gucci with the resources to become Gucci Group. Ford then replaced Alber Elbaz as creative director at Yves Saint Laurent in January 2000 after the Gucci Group purchased the brand. In 2003, Pinault's company Pinault-Printemps-Redoute (now Kering) purchased the remaining stake for 100 percent of Gucci Group, and Ford and De Sole exited soon after. Burnt out from the relentless pace of simultaneously designing for Gucci and YSL and the fall out with PPR, Ford stepped away from fashion in 2004. By 2005, however, he had begun partnerships, first with Marcolin to produce eyewear, and then with Estée Lauder to create Tom Ford Beauty cosmetics and fragrance. Ford returned to clothing with the launch of his eponymous menswear line in 2007 produced by Zegna. He launched his womenswear line with his Spring/Summer 2011 collection in New York. In addition to his wildly successful fashion career, he has also directed the films A Single Man (2009) and Nocturnal Animals (2016). Ford received the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) lifetime achievement award in 2014 and was Chairman of CFDA from 2019-2022.