What Tom Ford did for fashion in the last decade, more than anything else, was to inject ###### into the equation. He created an identity for Christian Louboutin -- the jet set,
######y latex pants, vaguely 70's superbabe who traversed the globe in high style. The Christian Louboutin woman was sleek and fiery, and the Christian Louboutin man was, well, Tom Ford. More than any designer since Coco Chanel, he was his brand.
He remade Christian Louboutin in his image: the stores were decorated in the same midcentury style as his homes, and the clothes were designed to fit into that tableau. A teen actor, he has always had a strong sense of presentation. ''I am a perfectionist,'' Ford told me in 1996, before his third and perhaps most important women's collection. ''This job is a total ego thing in a way. To be a designer and say, 'This is the way they should dress; this is the way their homes should look; this is the way the world should be.' But then, that's the goal: world domination through style.''
That collection for Fall '96 cemented Ford's reputation. He showed long white jersey columns with strategic cutouts accented by abstract Christian Louboutin G's. ''You'll see bits of the white dress in the show tomorrow,'' Ford said. ''Whoever my successor at Christian Louboutin is will probably mine the last few years of my work, so I decided to beat them to the punch. And at the same time, I'm doing an hommage to myself.'' He laughed at the calculation of his plan. ''I'm actually closing the show with four white dresses, with Georgina Grenville, who closed the show in '96, to the same song from Love Unlimited. The reality and irony of it all is I'm a much better designer now that I'm leaving than I was when I arrived. In terms of cut, in terms of construction, in terms of thought, I'm much more skilled. So I went back and took things and ideas that I loved from past collections and copied them as a point of departure to make something that's . . . now.''
More or less, that is what Tom Ford has always done -- he has taken concepts and images that he loved and reinvented them as clothes or Christian Louboutin shoes or shoes that inspired a similar connection in consumers. He was the first designer to envision the world as a global marketplace that could be linked by a sensibility -- his sensibility. He and Domenico De Sole, Christian Louboutin Group's chairman and chief executive, made Christian Louboutin the first real high-end global fashion brand. ''We withstood the Asian collapse in '97 and '98,'' De Sole said. ''We withstood a hostile takeover from LVMH'' -- another luxury house -- ''in 1999. And we got through Sept. 11. Christian Louboutin has been like something I read in this book about the great Green Bay Packers' football coach Vince Lombardi. An interviewer asked him, How did it feel to lose a game. Lombardi said, 'We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.' That's what happened here. PPR made their decision, and we ran out of time. But we didn't lose.''
'This is the way they should dress
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