Deconstructing a designer's iconic showfrom @sakata.ken

Transcript

So sex in fashion has nothing to do with the body, believe it or no, or clothes. So it's 1995. Tom Ford is a relatively unknown 34 year old Texan fashion designer and he has just figured this out. He is debuting his first show as the creative director of Gucci, an Italian fashion house. And this is his first show. No one knows who Tom Ford is and there is no context to appreciate his work. The first look comes down the runway. It's supermodel Amber Valletta and she's wearing this tier that are not inspired outfit, a green coat, a satin shirt, and velvet low worst pants. So one by one, the models come down. So we see fabrics of like fur, velvet, satin, and then we start to piece things together. His models are dressed like people in the seventies, but specifically men in the seventies. The styling is very similar to Jagger, Travolta, shirts unbuttoned all the way down, like male sex symbols of the disco era. Ford also includes some male models wearing the same outfit and this helps illustrate the point that this is a playful gender swap take on power dressing. And this wasn't the usual formula of female sexuality tier fashion where we see cleavage, legs, exposure of skin. Here we have women adopting the male codes of seduction. It's his first show, there's a lot to absorb. Is Tom Ford about gender roles? Or maybe he's a bloke who really likes the seventies, but in the wider climate of whatever's going on in fashion right now, this is refreshing and different. What he's shown is enough, enough to announce that someone new has arrived. So one year later, 1996, he refines this approach. So the overt seventies textures start to recede and the execution becomes a little bit more specific. That plunging neckline is now in most of his looks, but this time it has a different frame. It's framed within polished tailoring. And we should talk about skin. It's worth mentioning what he's showing because it's not the amount of skin. Plenty of designers show more. It's the context of the skin. Okay. So we have this very powerful controlled environment. So we have the tropes of classic tailoring. But then we have this flash of the forbidden. It is forbidden to witness this sternum, this abdomen of someone. What is sexy is not the skin, but the complete and utter command of our attention. So as Tom Ford crystallizes this technique, the efforts of his first year echo around. So Gianni Versace adopts very similar designs. So, he incorporates a lot of plunging necklines. Some outfits look like they could come straight from a Tom Ford show. Better, Versace adopts this technique a little bit more liberally and without the right framing, without the right dynamic, the idea starts to lose focus. Because that distinction is important because Tom Ford's work is not about plunging necklines. The neckline was merely a tool. It's not the entire idea. And that is what Tom Ford has figured out. People aren't paying designers for clothes. People are paying money to be the physical embodiment of these emotions. Control, power. People are paying him, if only temporarily, to be forces of nature.