A Big, Luscious, Fur-Drenched Bang

At Gucci, Tom Ford pioneered the IDGAF sexiness that’s pulsing through this season’s best clothes. Liana Satenstein remembers his final collection for the brand 20 years after its catwalk debut.

It’s been two decades since Tom Ford’s last show for Gucci; an apex of torrential glamour and fur-laden sensuality. After becoming creative director in 1994, Ford redefined the Italian house, transforming the brand via well-tailored hedonism. Sex sold, and so did his take on great quality.

The essence of Ford’s Fall/Winter 2004 show—and perhaps his reign at Gucci in its totality—is contained in an incredible coat that languishes on 1stDibs, tucked away in a dealer’s closet outside of St. Petersburg, Florida. Look at the construction—tiered, bold-shouldered—and the fabrics—fur, reptile. The piece is far from Ford’s sleek and minimalist Gucci during the mid and late ’90s. The back of the coat is covered in shiny obsidian pony skin; hulking swathes of black leather trace underneath the arms and down the sides to create the trompe l’oeil effect of a disappearing wasp waist. High collar. Thick obi belt. A waterfall of black fox fur bursts into a skirt. It demands the wearer to be engulfed; consumed in all $18,000 of it.

The Russian model Natasha Poly wore the coat on Ford’s runway, savagely trotting down the wavy rug stretched out on a glassy black catwalk for the affair. The Fall/Winter 2004 clothes were dangerously cinched, tailored to perfection. Rich materials. Rich construction. Swede Adina Fohlin opened in an incredible aubergine skirt suit; a severely pinched waist that gave bloom to a sturdy peplum. Russian model Eugenia Volodina became a Bond girl, stomping around in a python-trimmed fox fur jacket that was suffocatingly snatched with a belt (more python); the bottom was a wedding-white grosgrain skirt constructed from car-wash pleats.Ford famously revived the dying Gucci brand, taking it from a dusty, family-run leather goods house that was making a paltry $200 million a year into a mammoth $3.2 billion business with killer marketing and the clothes to back it up. Remember that widely banned ad of Carmen Kass with a Fordified satin kimono draped around her naked torso, tugging her underwear down to reveal pubic hair meticulously shaved into a G? Years later, Ford told GQ that he put a male model in a floss-thin G-string and had to trim the hairs sprouting from the model’s ass crack. Ford was brazen.The designer wasn’t always so forward. Born and bred in Texas, the self-described “shy” teen came to New York University in 1979 to study art but later dropped out after hooking up with some of Studio 54’s shiniest patrons, including Andy Warhol, licking up the literal last days of disco; a scene that later would become an integral part of his work. “I longed for the visual minimalism and, and richness of that period, because the late ’70s were very minimal. However, when you touched anything in the late ’70s. . . the touch of things was sensual,” said the designer to ’s Hamish Bowles on the podcast. “It was silk or it was fur or it was velvet, and I longed for that.”

Ford wanted to become a designer and sweet-talked his way into a job as a design assistant with Cathy Hardwick and later went to Perry Ellis, where Marc Jacobs was the president. In 1990, then-creative director Dawn Mello saw something in Ford and hired him on the Gucci team. Ford began to rise within the company ranks and Mello left Gucci for Bergdorf Goodman in 1994. Soon after, Ford became creative director, sending out his first collection for Gucci in fall 1995—Kate Moss and Amber Valletta swaggering down the runway in skin-tight velvet flares and sumptuous satin shirts. A few months later, Madonna wore Moss’s Look 3, a blazing blue top, to accept her award at the MTV VMAs.Gucci was a . And it became such a thing that Gucci Group—the corporate entity behind the house—ended up acquiring Yves Saint Laurent in 1999, and Ford became creative director of that house, too. Laurent himself hated Ford’s takeover, but the designer prevailed. “Because at that time, everything I touched, worked,” an ever self-aware Ford told GQ.All of that buildup; all of that work; and those acquisitions. . . and now Ford was saying goodbye due to major disagreements between Ford and François Pinault, who had been buying up Gucci Group for Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, or PPR. Cathy Horyn broke down the luxury kerfuffle in a story in October 2003. “Pinault-Printemps-Redoute, which owns 68% of Gucci and has pledged to buy the rest by next spring, insists on exerting management control,” she wrote, later adding that Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour said Ford’s leaving would be “a catastrophe.” Ford had always stressed that the disagreement wasn’t about the money, but rather it was about the principle of having control over something he grew and created. PPR, now Kering, wouldn’t budge and wanted to control Gucci Group.Keep in mind, Ford, along with his right hand man Domenico De Sole, an Italian attorney and the eventual president and CEO of Gucci Group, had a hand in helping PPR acquire Nicolas Ghesquière-era Balenciaga, Stella McCartney, and Bottega Veneta. Ford, who considered himself a “commercial designer” went after those who he admired.Ford, along with De Sole, wouldn’t give it up and left. The industry was shocked. “It was also part of a bigger narrative. He was stepping away from the Gucci Group,” recalls ’s Fashion News Director Mark Holgate. “It was like Tom Ford was stepping away from fashion.”Of course, Ford’s last show would be monumental. The classic big guns were on board. French Editor-in-Chief Carine Roitfeld styled. Pat McGrath did makeup, making kohl sweat around the eyes as if Ford’s troupe of models had just exited an insatiable club-bathroom romp. Those sweaty gazes were countered by hairstylist Orlando Pita, who slickly molded hair to skull, cutting a brutally deep side part and knotting it into the tightest little bun. (“Like the ponytail was for Helmut Lang, that [bun] kind of became something that was known to be a very Tom Ford look,” Pita tells me.) The mugs were sleek, chic, and ferociously sensual.Rose petals fell during the finale at Hotel Diana, in Rome, where Ford had long held his shows. Critics wrote about this collection with such sweltering passion, you’d think it was a dressy Fabio novel. “Sex slithered down a spotlit runway until one last model stood at its foot in a white jersey evening gown, the garment’s liquid folds undulating over the curves of her body,” penned fashion critic Robin Givhan for . “There is no doubt who the Gucci woman is: the embodiment of sexual confidence, burnished to a high gloss and bursting with predatory power,” wrote Vogue critic Sarah Mower.

Today, designers play a perpetual game of musical chairs; leaving a house is another Instagram announcement. But Ford’s departure sent a shock wave throughout the industry—it was one of the first of its time. “It just seemed unimaginable that a decade of Tom Ford was about to come to an end, because we just also weren’t used to that cycling in and out of designers,” says Holgate. “Plus, it was a double whammy because he was also leaving Saint Laurent.”So what better way to go out than with a big, luscious, fur-drenched bang? The show was brimming with tense emotion both visually and politically. Ford didn’t invite anyone from PPR. (Nor did he invite the team to his final Yves Saint Laurent show.) Lynn Hirschberg wrote in a article from March 2004, aptly titled “Arrivederci, Gucci,” that “Free” by Ultra Naté played as Ford walked down the runway for his final bow. The lyrics are telling: A saucy tale of liberation!Ford played his greatest hits. Although the departure may have felt abrupt, it was almost as if he had been working up to this moment for his entire tenure at Gucci: simmering foreplay of well-heeled looks that finally exploded. This time, there were no episodic Gucci girl characters: the rich hippie, the sultry goth chick, or the ’70s club maven. Now, the Gucci girl was a full-blown woman; a hypnotic glamazon who knew her power and had the signature pieces locked and loaded in her wardrobe arsenal.“I keep coming back to that word ‘unimaginable,’ but that’s really how it felt,” says Holgate. “His language of Gucci had become really much more constructed, glamorous, polished. In a way, it was a nod to his kind of idea of what glamour is, which was cinematic, highly finished, highly orchestrated, and highly directed.” Fall/Winter 2004 was the throbbing peak of Ford-Gucci style nirvana. The blue velvet jackets from 1995 were now more deeply cut and paired with slinky, swirl-embroidered bedazzled trousers. The white Halston gowns with the hip cutouts from Fall/Winter 1996 were fastened by a glittering ouroboros horsebit.

There is an incredible aubergine and deep plum suede jacket on the small specialty resale site Recess. The piece has a throat-grazing high collar. A python strip encircles the bicep, tracing around the elbow, and reaches the forearm—touching every red-hot pressure point. The inverted darts on the waists make it appear as if the body is pulling into itself. The jacket is so finely executed, it could give a tomato a figure.For Gucci lovers and collectors, the details of Ford’s last collection are unmatchable. Justin Friedman, who runs the popular Gucci throwback account @tomfordforgucci, notes that the construction of the garments was extraordinary. “They became more worked,” says Friedman. (It’s worth noting that “worked” was a term that Ford used himself to describe his collections, and one that Ford aficionados use as well.) “They were much more detailed deliberately. It wasn’t just the look that was detailed anymore, and it wasn’t just the fabrications, all of a sudden it was these panels of organza overlaid over satin with tassels.”Former designer Neil Leonard, a Gucci and YSL dealer of the account @lab2022, who bought Gucci during Ford’s era on the advice of Mello herself, sent over a photo of Volodina wearing a plum jacket sliced with velvet straps, along with a still of a simple pinstripe blazer from Fall/Winter 1996. “I thought it was a good way to think about where he had come as far as where his head was as far as design goes. It is less than ten years,” says Leonard. “He had gone from really, really incredibly simple to that purple jacket. . . it has got to have 500 pleats, seams, and inset velvet straps.”Even beyond material combinations and construction intricacies, this was Ford’s dagger-heeled utopian world and everyone was just living in it—or at least hoped to be. Pita, who had worked with Ford on the last few seasons, distilled the designer’s philosophy. “It was always fun playing with the looks with Tom because sometimes we would go through pictures in the past and sometimes we would just talk about the kind of woman that should wear a hairstyle in a particular way,” he says. “He said, ‘I want people to take these pictures to their hairdresser and say, I want that hair.’”

To see something and then want to re-create the look is perhaps the biggest feat in itself. It’s making someone want to channel a fantasy on the street. Ford succeeded: Editors wanted the pieces. “I remember once we did a show and I saw [ editor] Candy Pratts Price flying home from that show with one of the coats, and I asked, ‘How did you get it so quick?’” says Pita. “She goes, ‘I told Tom I had to have it. I think I have to give it back though.’” The collection was symbolic of Ford’s obsessiveness. He always copped to knocking himself off before anyone else could; a symptom of his painstaking attention to detail. “He revisited his past, but I think he really did it in such a way to bring it into some continuity and some real declaration about what his idea of Gucci was,” says Holgate. The hits were there, but now just more high-octane.The Ford for Gucci era was a true extension of Ford himself. “That collection matters because it was the last time a designer dared to give us hedonistic, sex-fueled glamour, and that hedonism and sexuality was honest coming from Ford,” says Friedman. “He knew it. He lived it. It had truth. And I think it really was the last for sexuality and indulgence at that level of fashion.” And where is the sex today? The flagrant display of skin doesn’t compare. Perhaps that is because sensuality isn’t innate to the runway anymore; or perhaps it’s missing in the designers themselves. And Ford himself is sexy, even till this day. He is 62 years old and still exudes an ice-cold smolder; a blasé confidence. Those elegant tufts of chest hair; a great jawline; and Kevlar skin that has everyone asking, “Who’s his derm?” Ford was Gucci just as much as Gucci was Ford. “I literally sent my sofas out to be copied for the stores,” he told GQ.In 2004, many, including Ford himself, thought that he would leave fashion forever. Of course, Ford returned with a bang in 2006 with De Sole to launch TOM FORD, which was the designer’s venture into the beauty sphere. The TOM FORD scents were exactly what they should have smelled like: Black Orchid, with hints of fruit and chocolate, is supposedly intended to smell like a man’s crotch. Menswear came later, in 2007, and in 2010, he had Beyoncé and Julianne Moore model the debut of his Spring/Summer 2011 womenswear collection at the Madison Avenue flagship store. It wasn’t until almost 20 years later that Ford finally decided to call it quits for real: In 2023, he sold TOM FORD to Estée Lauder for a massive $2.8 billion.Just like Ford, his collections are ageless. Last week, I met with a woman who is the PR head of an affordable American lifestyle brand. She waltzed into the restaurant in a gray python-print long-sleeved top from Gucci Spring/Summer 2000, and then later that night, sent me a mirror selfie of the matching pants. Absolutely sweltering. She transformed herself from a pert PR pro to a nighttime sexpot courtesy of Ford’s reptile-print, elegantly louche looks. Celebrities in Ford’s Gucci are still perpetually making fashion newswire rounds. In 2021, Rihanna had the internet frothing when she was photographed at an airport bookshop in his Spring/Summer 1999 feather-trimmed pants in the airport. Back in 2021, Kylie donned a little tight dress from the Spring/Summer 2000 show that Jacquetta Wheeler once wore. And who can forget Kim Kardashian, who back in 2018, posed in the G-emblem Gucci thong from Spring/Summer 1997, subsequently jacking up the prices for Ford-era Gucci across the board?And as for Gucci now? Every collection has a whiff or a riff of Ford’s work. Alessandro Michele, who worked under Ford, whipped up his rendition of the red velvet suit from fall 1996 that Gwyneth Paltrow once wore. The newest successor of Gucci, Sabato De Sarno, rendered a Ford special into his own for the debut collection: a white sleeveless top encrusted with crystals plucked from Ford’s Spring/Summer 1999 collection.But are these pieces ? Or rather, will anyone ever serve sex the drippy, Ford way again? Raw yet sleek. Unbridled yet every stitch in place? And will anyone ever churn out a fur coat that’s banded together with reptile skin that has the power to transform any woman into an oligarch’s wife with the cinch of a belt? Perhaps not. No one can bottle Ford’s sexy. Luckily, that jacket is still up for grabs.

Vogue