BigShinyThing

The ex-Gucci designer and iconoclast-about-town has announced that the Internet is useful. Tom Ford told Women’s Wear Daily:

I think it is important to always address and use the primary media of one’s time and we all have to face the fact that there is no more powerful media than the internet. It is how most of us communicate, get our news, entertain ourselves, and increasingly shop.

Unfortunately, Ford has chosen to embrace a retro, 1.0 version of the Web and his site is so weighed down with Flash frills that we couldn’t actually access it. So not a good look.

Story via UK Vogue.

Ford has not only launched his own film production company, Fade to Black, and started writing his own screenplay. He’s also announced plans for an eponymous menswear label next year, which he says will provide “the ultimate luxury store for men”. This weekend he was doing PR for his tie up with Estee Launder.

The two phase deal will see a November launch of a limited edition Amber Dew range and the relaunch of the label’s 50 year old Youth Dew fragrance. Next year, a standalone Tom Ford Estee Lauder collection will be unveiled. Ford is already busy plundering the company’s 60 year old archives, a trick he learnt at Gucci, with the intention of revitalising a number of iconic 60s and 70s products. Ford recently told Women’s Wear Daily:

There’s so much flash right now, so many people endorsing things. Things are reaching a sort of hollow peak. Quality of product is number one. If I were designing ready-to-wear right now, that is what it would be about - real, true value … I mean value in terms of quality.

Both deals are in partnership with his Gucci cohort, Domenico de Sole, the business brains behind his design brawn. In this weekend’s Observer fashion supplement, Mark Tungate, author of Fashion Brands: Branding Style from Armani to Zara, explained the dynamic behind the duo:

Ford has never been your typical fashion designer who sits on a pink cloud thinking about his art and claiming not to be interested in commercial matters. As you might expect from a man who shares his name with an iconic car manufacturer, Ford wants to sell. He has commercial tastes and has said so on many occasions. He doesn’t think marketing is a dirty word. De Sole, so rare among management, knows creativity is about taking risks.

Ford has also done a fabulously silly shoot for W magazine - pictured - in which he cavorts with Barbarella styled men and $3000 female sex dolls - pictured. Ford says of the shoot, “We’ve become plastic, objectifying the human body…waxed and polished and buffed and shined up and manipulated,” Ford says. “And then, of course, I’m portrayed as the one doing the manipulating, the polishing, buffing, shaping, which is what I do. It’s just what we do. What the fashion industry does.”