The last time I wrote something like this for Tom was 17 years ago, when his first book came out. It was a big, lush volume, and it was called, not surprisingly, Tom Ford. Which was good in that you knew what you were getting: lots of sexy photos of really attractive people in really fabulous clothes licking things like fruit. Or just licking each other.
As I mentioned back in that previous introduction, we had dinner together at the Ivy in London the night before he announced his departure from Gucci. In the fashion world, it was a seismic event. That evening at dinner, though, Tom was as calm as if he were going off to an ashram for the weekend. Which he might well have been planning to do. Tom had been creating 16 separate collections a year at that point—half for Gucci and the other half for YSL, which he was also then designing. And he was exhausted.
