Tom Ford has surprised many of his fans today by revealing that he has starred in a fly-on-the-wall documentary about himself which will reveal his every personal foible – PLUS never before seen footage from behind the scenes at his womenswear comeback show – the one that starred Julianne Moore and Beyonce on the catwalk.
We don’t think the fact he has agreed to the filming is a huge shock at all – after all , he’s not averse to media exposure, he just prefers to control any output concerning him as tightly as possible. PLUS stars like Marc Jacobs, Valentino Garavani and Karl Lagerfeld (and Anna Wintour come to mention it) have all had feature length docs about themselves, which Tom would know about.
What made our eyebrows go up a little bit was reading some of the quotes from Mr Ford in the preview article, for example;
'I have mixed feelings about what we do because we convince people they're not perfect enough. . . We promote materialism, which is ultimately not the thing that brings you happiness in the world.'
Blimey! Are you having doubts about your career and path in life Tom? Not enough to give it all up to go and build wells in Africa we think. He also spoke about the weirdness of leaving Gucci;
‘I remember the day I left Gucci,’ Ford says. ‘My last day which was in April. I came home, pulled all the drapes, and went to sleep. I woke up the next morning and looked at my calendar. It was usually so full, and there was just nothing. I didn't know who I was, I didn't know what I was supposed to be.’
To take his mind off things Ford says he channeled this personal and professional crisis of identity into his debut feature film, A Single Man, which came out in 2009, starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.
It's ‘very much my midlife crisis on screen,’ Ford says. ‘I grafted an enormous part of my life’ into the film—even the two dogs on screen are Ford's own dogs. ‘There's a very squiggly line between Tom Ford the man and Tom Ford the brand.’
Right – seeing as we can’t find ANYTHING ANYWHERE that says you are able watch the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN, on which the documentary premieres this month) from UK tellies, we are STRAIGHT OFF home to watch A Single Man again and try to figure out which bits he’s talking about. We hope not the suicide bit – although we can imagine that if he was to contemplate ending it all, he would probably take care not to create too much mess in his perfect show home. Or is that a bit morbid of us?
- Naomi Attwood
