It was the first show since Tom Ford’s exit
Walking through the sand-strewn tunnels that led you to the Tom Ford runway on Thursday evening – with an erotic Madonna mega mix blasting through the speakers – you felt like you were being transported to another world. It was an appropriate feeling for a brand founded by a designer whose aesthetics are entirely his own. Now, after Ford’s exit following the sale of the company to Estée Lauder, those codes belong to its new creative director Peter Hawkings, the British designer who first worked for Ford at Gucci and went on to lead the designer’s menswear collections at his eponymous brand. You could call this season’s show a debut, but having worked for Ford for 25 years, Hawkings knew what he was doing.
Peter Hawkings cemented the codes of Tom Ford
“I feel great. I feel amazing. That was just so much fun,” Hawkings said after the show, which doubled down on the sensual, glamorous power-dressing at the heart of Tom Ford. “It’s a brilliant experience but one that I feel like I’ve been preparing for my entire life. While it was kind of daunting at the beginning, it just felt like a natural evolution both for me and for the brand. Obviously, having worked with Tom for 25 years, him handing over the brand to me meant everything to me.” Hawkings’s job is to honour the things people love about Tom Ford, but breathe new excitement into those codes. For his first show at the helm of the brand, he established his knowledge of both Ford and the brand’s histories and laid the foundation new explorations.
It unified the women’s and menswear expressions
Backstage, Hawkings said his primary ambition was to bring the Tom Ford woman closer to the man, whose wardrobe he’s been in charge of from the company’s London studio while Ford’s womenswear team was previously based in Los Angeles. “I think there was a disconnect before, for sure,” he said. “Now, it’s under one roof.” To remind his audience of what that man looks like – not that you could ever forget – Hawkings filtered in men’s looks throughout the show, cementing the idea of the Tom Ford couple. They were defined by a louche and seductive glamour, but one that consistently balanced the fine line between luxury and excess. Often, they evoked the sense of reduction that embodied Ford’s sophisticated glamour at Gucci.
Hawkings paid tribute to his wife
Hawkings took inspiration from the Detroit-born model Donyale Luna, who worked with Andy Warhol and Richard Avedon and personified the modern, graphic glamour of the ’60s and ’70s. But it was the influence of another woman that really underpinned the collection: his wife Whitney Hawkings, a former Tom Ford employee who went on to found FLOWERBX. The couple met at Gucci. “She was heavily influenced at that time by people who were around her, like Carine [Roitfeld] and all of those strong women,” the designer explained. “She’s my rock and I run everything by her. For me, it’s so helpful having a wife with a strong opinion. She will tell me whether she loves or hates something, how it fits, how comfortable it is. I think that’s so important because I can’t try the clothes on but she can.”
It was a taste of things to come
In many ways, Hawkings’s first solo show for Tom Ford felt like a reset for the brand. Not a blank canvas – there’s nothing blank about these clothes – but a consolidation needed to solidify its identity before it enters a new era. With its runway shows now on Milanese soil (the company’s licence is held by the Zegna Group) Hawkings has the freedom to turn up the volume on his fashion proposals and push Tom Ford beyond the idea of the wardrobe that’s already so established, both for his audience and for the designer himself. As he said, “Obviously, working with Tom for 25 years, the design ethos is engrained in me. I was part of that all those years ago. He’s inspired me to create my own codes and build on them for the future.” New fashion moments: incoming.
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