The House of Gucci

by Sara G Forden

  “He couldn’t have been too shocked,” retorted his classmate, the illustrator Ian Falconer, “because by the end of the night we were necking in a cab!” Before long, Ford became a regular at Studio 54. He partied all night, slept all day, and quit going to classes—much more interested in what he was picking up in his new club life.

  “I had had friends back in Santa Fe that I had been obsessed with, but I didn’t realize until I got to New York that I had been in love with them,” Ford said. “I kind of knew it somewhere inside myself, but it was all pushed so far back.”

  By 1980, at the end of his freshman year, he dropped out of NYU altogether and started acting in television commercials. His good looks, speaking ability, and easy presence in front of the camera made him a success. He moved to Los Angeles. At one point he had twelve commercials on the air at the same time. Then one day the unthinkable happened. A hairdresser doing his hair for a Prell shampoo commercial did a double take at Ford’s scalp, where the hairline was receding ever so slightly.

  “Ooh, honey!” the male hairdresser said in a high, nasal voice. “You’re losin’ your hair.” Ford’s composure shattered.

  “He was a bitchy queen and I was only nineteen or twenty and I just got paranoid,” Ford recalls. For the rest of the shoot he kept his chin jutting downwards and with his fingers obsessively brushed his bangs ever lower over his forehead.

  “The director kept stopping the camera and shouting, ‘Would you please fix his hair!’” Ford recalled. The incident stayed with him. As he worked, insecurity about his hair mounting, Ford also found himself thinking, “I can write a better commercial,” or “I would direct it this way” or “That looks better over there…” He realized that he wanted to be on the control side.

  Ford enrolled at Parsons School of Design in New York, where he studied architecture, a field he had been interested in since the early days of rearranging his family living room. Partway through the program he moved to Paris, where Parsons also has a campus. But when he had nearly completed his studies, he realized that architecture was far too serious for his taste. An internship at French fashion house Chloé confirmed his sensation—the world of fashion was a lot more fun. Toward the end of his junior year he traveled to Russia for a two-week holiday; one night he came down with a bad bout of food poisoning and dragged himself back to his drafty hotel room.

  “I was miserable and stayed in my room alone that night and I just started thinking,” Ford said. “I knew I didn’t want to do what I was doing, and all of a sudden, FASHION DESIGNER came into my head! It just came to me like a computer printout.” He thought he knew what one needed to be a successful fashion designer—smarts, articulate speech, the ability to stand up in front of a camera, good ideas about what people should wear.

  Ford’s model had been Calvin Klein. Even before Armani was a big name in the United States, Ford remembered buying Calvin Klein sheets for his bed when he was in high school during the mid-to-late seventies.

  “Calvin Klein was young, stylish, rich, and attractive,” said Ford, remembering himself as a teenager poring over a magazine featuring slick black-and-white shots of Klein in his New York penthouse apartment.

  “He licensed his name, he sold jeans, he sold ready-to-wear—he was the first fashion designer as movie star.” Ford dreamed of becoming like Calvin Klein, whom he had actually met during his Studio 54 days and had followed around like an adoring puppy.

  Back in Paris, the Parsons administration told Ford he would have to start his curriculum over from scratch if he wanted to major in fashion design—something Ford wasn’t willing to do. He graduated in architecture in 1986, went back to New York, drew up a fashion portfolio, and started looking for a job; he just didn’t mention what department he had graduated from and didn’t let himself get discouraged by rejection.

  “I guess I’m very naive or confident or both,” Ford said. “When I want something I’m going to get it. I had decided I was going to be a fashion designer and one of those people was going to hire me!” He made a wish list and started calling designers every day.

  “I told him on the phone I didn’t have any positions open,” recalled the New York–based designer Cathy Hardwick. “But he was so polite. ‘Can I just show you my book?’ One day I gave in. ‘How soon can you come over?’ I asked him. ‘In one minute,’ he said. He was down in the lobby!” Impressed by his work, Hardwick hired him.

  “I didn’t know how to do anything,” Ford recalled. During his first few weeks with Cathy Hardwick, she asked him to make a circle skirt. He nodded, went downstairs, hopped on the uptown subway, and got out at Bloomingdale’s, where he made a beeline for the dress department. There, he flipped all the circle skirts he could find inside-out to see how they were made. “Then I went back, drew the skirt, gave it to the pattern maker, and made a circle skirt!” Ford said.

  Ford was working for Cathy Hardwick when he met Richard Buckley, then a writer and editor at fashion publishing house Fairchild Publications and today the Paris-based editor-in-chief for Vogue Hommes International. Ford was twenty-five and had movie-star looks—piercing dark eyes, a strong chin, and dark brown, shoulder-length hair. He still wore blue jeans and oxford button-down shirts. Buckley, thirty-seven, had sapphire-blue eyes, a stiff shock of salt-and-pepper hair he wore in a bristly crew cut, and a biting sense of humor that masked his shyness. He dressed in the fashion editor’s eternal uniform: trim black pants, black boots with elastic insets at the ankles, a crisp white shirt without a tie, and a black jacket. Buckley had recently moved back to New York to head up Fairchild’s then-new Scene magazine, now defunct, after working in Fairchild’s Paris bureau as European editor of its menswear daily DNR. He had spotted Ford at a David Cameron fashion show. When he saw the young, dark-haired Ford, his heart had jumped for the first time in a long time. He hung around after the show with the excuse he had to interview some retailers—and looked around for Ford, who had vanished. Ford had noticed Buckley at the fashion show too.

  “At one point I turned around and saw this guy just staring at me,” Ford recalled. With his ice-blue eyes, spiky hair, and intent expression, Buckley looked possessed. “He scared me!” Ford said.

  To Buckley’s amazement, he came face-to-face with Ford himself ten days later, on the roof of the Fairchild building on West Thirty-fourth Street, where he was supervising a fashion shoot for Scene. Given the grueling pace of his job—he was fashion editor of the daily trade paper Women’s Wear Daily as well as editor of Scene—he had resorted to the rooftop for a last-minute shoot. Cathy Hardwick had sent Ford over to pick up some clothes, which Buckley hadn’t yet finished photographing. Just as Buckley was confiding in the art director about having seen Ford at the fashion show, Ford himself walked out on the rooftop to see about the clothes.

  Buckley’s eyes widened and he gulped. “That’s him!” he whispered to the art director, “the guy I was telling you about…”

  Buckley tried to greet Ford nonchalantly and asked if he could wait for the clothes, explaining that he hadn’t finished shooting them yet. Ford agreed. As they took the elevator back downstairs together later, Buckley—usually witty and polished—found himself blathering shamelessly.

  “He must have thought I was a complete idiot,” Buckley recalled. Ford didn’t.

  “It sounds so silly, but I thought he was nice,” Ford said later. “And in our business, it’s rare to find people who are real and have a good heart.”

  On their first date, at Albuquerque Eats over on the East Side one November evening in 1986, Buckley and Ford quickly found themselves in deep conversation—which left Buckley impressed with Ford’s focus and sense of mission. As they sipped drinks and munched shrimp quesadillas at their table amid the rollicking young crowd, Ford told Buckley exactly what he wanted to be doing ten years from then.

  “I want to create clean sportswear with a European flair, more sophisticated and modern than Calvin Klein but with a sales volume like Ralph Lauren’s,” Ford
said as Buckley listened with a mixture of pity and amazement.

  “Ralph Lauren is the only designer that has really created an entire world,” Ford explained earnestly to Buckley. “You know exactly what his kind of people look like, what their houses look like, what kind of cars they drive—and he is making all these products for them. I want to do that in my own way!”

  Buckley leaned back against the padded leather seat of their booth and observed his handsome new friend. “He’s so young and he already wants to be a millionaire,” he thought to himself. “Just wait until he gets out there and gets beaten up in the rough-and-tumble world of New York fashion,” Buckley thought, half feeling sorry for Ford and half hoping the young designer could prove himself despite the odds.

  Something had clicked between the two men: one was focused, ambitious, and unknown; the other had become quite a man-about-town through his work for Fairchild—he went on to edit the gossipy “Eye” column—but hadn’t lost his friendly, down-to-earth personality.

  “Richard was nice, smart, and funny,” said Ford. “He just had the whole package.” Buckley and Ford moved in together that New Year’s Eve. It would become the partnership of their lives.

  Buckley had just moved into a 700-square-foot apartment on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village; Ford was living in an apartment at Madison and Twenty-eighth that backed up onto a single-room-occupancy hotel. “The building was perfectly nice and so was the apartment, but at night the windows looked into these rooms where you could see people shooting up; it was very scary,” recalled Ford.

  “We agreed he would move in with me,” Buckley said.

  Two years later, a smooth-haired fox terrier also moved into the St. Mark’s Place apartment, a birthday present from Buckley to Ford. “From the beginning, Tom wanted a dog,” Buckley recalled. “I fought it for a long time, but I finally gave in.” John, as they named the terrier, became their loyal companion and a shameless model whom they gussied up in wigs and outrageous drag outfits for Polaroid photos they sent to close friends. Despite his initial opposition, Buckley grew so attached to John it often seemed as though the friendly terrier was his own.

  Meanwhile, in the spring of 1987, Ford, frustrated with his career, had quit Cathy Hardwick. He dreamed of landing a design job with Calvin Klein, the champion of the kind of clean sportswear Ford wanted to design. After nine separate interviews, two of which were with Calvin himself, Calvin Klein told Ford he wanted to hire him to work in the women’s design studio. Ford was ecstatic—until he received the financial offer, which was far below his expectations. Ford asked for more money and Calvin said he had to discuss the request with his business partner, Barry Schwartz. After putting in several follow-up calls, Ford didn’t hear anything back from Calvin Klein. When shortly thereafter designer Marc Jacobs asked him to come work with him at Perry Ellis, Ford accepted. Some time later, he came home from work one day to find a message from Calvin Klein’s secretary on the answering machine.

  “Mr. Klein is still very interested in you and he wants to make sure you haven’t taken another job, and before you take another job would you call him first?” the message said. Ford called back to say thanks, he had already taken the job with Perry Ellis.

  Buckley’s career took a jump the following year when he left Fairchild in March 1989 to join Tina Brown’s Vanity Fair, but his elation with the new job was quickly dampened. In April, Buckley was diagnosed with cancer. After what he had thought was acute tonsillitis failed to clear up after months of antibiotics, throat cultures, and a sunny trip to Puerto Rico, Buckley finally checked into St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital for a biopsy, thinking he was going in for a minor procedure. When he came out of anesthesia, the surgeon at St. Luke’s told him he had cancer, that he had to undergo more surgery the following week, and that his chances of surviving were 35 percent.

  Buckley swallowed painfully, shook his head, and said, “No! No! No! I want to go home! I want my dog, and my own bed!” Ford went to the hospital and took Buckley home, then he got on the phone. From Buckley’s Rolodex he pulled several names of leading New Yorkers who he knew were active in raising funds for the cancer research institute, Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Within twenty minutes, Buckley had an appointment two days later with a top surgeon and radiologist. Buckley then went through more surgery and months of painful radiation treatments. Ford called Buckley’s family every day to update them on his condition.

  When Buckley’s doctors told him that it appeared that he had won his battle with cancer—but that he should lead a less stressful life—Buckley and Ford turned their sights on Europe. Ford felt that a designer working in New York could be a success in the United States, but that a successful designer in Europe could achieve global recognition. Buckley thought he could get a good writing job that would involve less pressure than what he had been doing. In early summer 1990, they financed a European trip out of their own pockets, and started doing rounds of interviews. Ford had already called his friend Richard Lambertson on a previous trip to Milan, and had dinner with Lambertson and Dawn Mello. There Lambertson urged Mello to consider Ford for Gucci’s women’s ready-to-wear, but she shook her head. Her policy was “no friends.” In the meantime, thanks to his fashion contacts, Buckley had lined up a whirlwind round of appointments for Ford with just about every leading design house in Milan. After a sumptuous lunch with Donatella Versace, and meetings with Gabriella Forte at Giorgio Armani and Carla Fendi (who had met with Ford in New York and been impressed with his talent), there was still no job offer for Ford. They lunched again with Dawn Mello, who this time agreed to give Ford a trial project. After their lunch, Ford and Buckley went to the most exclusive florist in Milan and sent her a massive bouquet of the kind only Italians send, drowned in sprays of baby’s breath. “We were horrified when we saw all that baby’s breath and made them pull it all out!” Buckley recalled.

  “Dawn at that point had seen every wannabe in Milan,” Buckley said. “All the young designers out there wanted to reinvent the skirt. Tom already knew that you can’t reinvent the skirt. The key is what skirt you do at what time,” Buckley said. Mello loved the project Ford did for her so much she agreed to bend her own rules and hire him.

  “I just sensed he could do anything,” Mello said later.

  Ford moved to Milan in September 1990, and Buckley joined him in October as the new European editor of Mirabella magazine.

  For the first few days they lived in classy, though cramped quarters in a chic residence in Via Santo Spirito, located in Milan’s golden shopping triangle. The room, which was about the size of a closet, was nonetheless fully equipped with a cooking corner and luxurious trappings such as Frette sheets and Alessi pots and pans. Between Buckley, Ford, and eight enormous suitcases, they could hardly turn around. After a few days they found a pleasant apartment on Via Orti in southeast Milan with a large, wisteria-covered terrace, where John joined them. They furnished their new home with a mix of old pieces they had shipped over from New York and new pieces they had fun collecting in Europe, including a Biedermeier chest, two Charles X armchairs, and patterned upholstery.

  Ford and Buckley’s life in Milan soon settled into a routine. They made friends with the other young assistants on the Gucci design team, which soon became a tight-knit group. Together, they all learned the ups and downs of living in Milan—the food, the fashion parties, the ski weekends in the Alps, the long hours, the dreary weather.

  “Everybody felt a little displaced,” recalled David Bamber, the knitwear designer. “Milan was so different from New York.”

  Ford and Buckley had brought a multisystem VCR and later invested in a satellite dish. When they weren’t out to dinner with friends and colleagues, they stayed home and watched old movies in English. Blockbuster Video hadn’t yet opened in Milan, but Buckley brought back a stack of home videos every time he came back from New York—where he traveled often for cancer treatments. They watched their favorite movies over and over. Later, Ford would use
that habit purposefully to zero in on a mood he wanted to capture for a collection.

  Ford and Buckley’s apartment became a meeting ground for their new friends in Milan, all of whom were somehow connected to the fashion and design community. The small group would gather on the terrace at Via Orti for home-cooked meals Buckley prepared, and Ford often invited his design team over for evening work sessions.

  “We were supposed to be doing a cross between Calvin Klein and Timberland,” recalled David Bamber, who also traveled to Scotland to develop a cashmere program for Gucci, commissioning classic cashmere sweaters in a rainbow of colors.

  The Americans proved vital to Gucci’s future. Dawn Mello went far beyond resurrecting long-lost Gucci designs and artifacts for high-style accessories. She captured the attention of the all-important fashion press, promoted the company’s move into mainstream apparel, and recruited the innovative young designers who convinced the doubters that designer clothing indeed belonged in Gucci’s constellation. Among the designers, Tom Ford, of course, was the star whose stiletto heels, sleek suits, and fashion handbags would resuscitate Gucci’s fame and fortune. Beyond their talent, Mello and Ford offered Gucci something else crucial to Gucci’s success—the staying power to ride out the storms ahead.

  12

  DIVORCE

  The sun shone brightly the morning of January 22, 1990, taking the chill out of the air as mourners, wrapped in furs and winter coats, crowded into the church of Santa Chiara off of Rome’s Via della Camilluccia to pay their last respects to Aldo Gucci. His death shocked many of his friends and acquaintances. Dynamic and agile up to the end, Aldo appeared much younger than his eighty-four years. Few realized how old he was or that he had been undergoing treatments for prostate cancer. Not even a year had passed since that April afternoon in Geneva when he had been forced to sell his Gucci shares.