In 2003, Tom Ford produced an ad campaign for Gucci, the house he was designing for at the time, which showed a man pulling down a woman’s underwear to reveal a spare brush of public hair shaved into a perfect letter G. He’s shoved perfume bottles in between the butt cheeks of taut male models and staged a scene in which a fully naked glamazon irons a pair of pants for her dude. Ford is an agitator and disrupter when it comes to fashion visuals, but what’s often more shocking are the words that come out of his trimly bearded mouth. The designer, who is showing his Spring 2018 collection in New York this evening, has said some pretty outrageous things over the course of his 30-plus-year career. He’s not one to hold back, even when it comes to politics—back in December 2016, Ford was one of the only major fashion designers to come out and say he’d declined to dress Melania Trump in the past and he wouldn’t do so now that she’d become First Lady.
Seriousness aside, Ford is direct but humorous when he speaks publicly. He owns that fact that he has his Fruit of the Loom T-shirts tailored to his liking and that he once had a regular old tractor painted black for his mega-million dollar ranch in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The designer loves sensuality and sex so much that he has triumphed the idea of “sluttiness.” In short, Ford’s words, like the visuals he creates in the pages of magazines and in his films, are priceless. Below are 10 of the wildest statements the designer has ever made.
“I was born in a jacket. I was the only 3-year-old who walked around with a blazer folded over his arm. I was very particular and very difficult, and I would only wear certain shoes. When my mother would go out, I would move the furniture and rearrange the living room. I just wanted to redecorate the world.” —The New York Times, 1996
On his goth tractor: “I said to the foreman, ‘Can’t I have a black one?’ And he said, ‘Mr. Ford, they don’t make ’em in black.’ So then we had it resprayed . . . I know! It’s silly, though I really do care . . . though on the other hand, why shouldn’t I have a black tractor if I can have one?” —Vogue, 2003
“What’s wrong with sluts? I remember being like 11 and seeing the series I, Claudius on Masterpiece Theatre, which we watched as a family every Sunday. And I remember Claudius’s wife, Messalina, I believe, had a fuck-off with the most famous prostitute in Rome. And basically she made a fool of the whores by fucking more . . . . She actually out-fucked whoever the most famous prostitute in Rome at the time was. And I remember thinking, Wow! If I were a woman, I would have done that. Because how great to do that. If sluttiness is what you like, what’s wrong with that? Why do we think being a slut’s bad? Sluttiness is just a lot of freedom.” —GQ, 2004
“I like everybody with a touch of dirty. I mean, I’m not saying I want to go between someone’s legs and find flies buzzing around there . . . . It should be clean. But we’ve gotten silly about this. There’s nothing worse than kissing somebody, or hugging somebody, or going under their arm and smelling deodorant and like Lifebuoy soap. The smell of a body is a great thing.” —GQ, 2004
“When I come home I actually take off all of my clothes, and I wear no clothes until I leave. I eat naked. I do everything completely naked.”—Interview, 2011
“I was quoted as saying I like the smell of a man’s sweat but it was taken out of context—the fact is I like the smell of life—of earth and dust and sweat and horses. People say I’m always sex sex sex but it’s not actually all I think about. If I am making a dress for a woman, I pull the fabric in to show off her body in the most beautiful way. I love the look of a woman’s breasts, they are beautiful, so why not show them off.” —Vogue UK, June 2009
“At home, off-duty, I wear T-shirts from Fruit of the Loom, but I have them tailored—if the sleeves are cut over the tricep your arms look much better.” —Vogue UK, June 2009
“I thought I was fabulous and everyone else was stupid.” —GQ Australia, January 2012
“The Gucci woman—you know what she’s after. The Saint Laurent woman—she’s going to torture you a little bit. You might have sex, but she will drip a little hot wax on you first.” —2001
“You can show a breast, but not a nipple! To me a breast without a nipple is more perverse and is really creepy, but if I do those things, no magazine will run them, so I can’t push images too far or they’ll be rejected.” —New York Magazine, 2017
Watch the Tom Ford Spring 2018 Ready-to-Wear Show: