Gucci's gay guru.

To observe that gay men and lesbians dominate the fashion business may seem about as controversial as saying that Russians rule Moscow. But with a few exceptions (Todd Oldham, Isaac Mizrahi), the ranks of top designers who are publicly out of the closet are surprisingly thin. The standard explanation for this situation has to do with that elusive, transitory quality that defines fashion's nature: image. To succeed, a designer needs an image that is not only strong but also flexible, and to proclaim too publicly that one is gay (or straight, for that matter), while politically correct, may be philosophically limiting--especially, as with Gucci's Tom Ford, when your design philosophy is based on the notion that fashion's sexual force field should be fluid. "There's not such a hard line anymore between gay and straight," the 35-year-old Texan announces during an interview at New York City's Carlyle Hotel. Fashion is "not about what works for men and what works for women," the designer continues. "It's about a look of the moment."

Over the past three years, Ford has again and again captured the moment with his work. He is recognized by fashion critics as one of the three most influential designers of the mid 1990s, and it is no accident that the other two--Helmut Lang and Miuccia Prada--also blur boundaries relating to sex. The sensuality of Ford's designs, however, is the most overt of the group's. The come-hither shine of his men's and women's ready-to-wear collections, combined with his fresh eye and marketing savvy, has propelled the Italian luxury-goods company Gucci to a remarkable renaissance. "It has been his mandate to create an image for the house that is both arresting and commercial and he has done so, brilliantly, trumpeted the fashion bible Women's Wear Daily after Ford's fall 1997 women's collection was shown this past March in Milan. Ford, who has been at Gucci since 1990 and has been its worldwide creative director since 1994, has taken a company whose signature leather loafers and handbags had come to appeal primarily to your aunt in Amarillo and turned it into a source of body-baring chic for models and movie stars.

Ford's arrival in the awareness of gay men and lesbians started with his 1995 ready-to-wear collections, which featured hip-hugging pants and form-revealing shirts, a look that said both '50s gigolo and '70s nightclubber. (The designer's early days hanging out at Studio 54, while he was an undergraduate at New York University, have had an incalculable effect on his work.) But Ford designs much more than the high-style clothing that has received all the press attention. "He is responsible for many product categories, from men's and ladies' ready-to-wear to accessories and gifts," says Domenico De Sole, chief executive officer of the Gucci Group. "That kind of responsibility takes an extremely talented and focused person." The Ford-focused renovation, which has occurred amid tremendous mid-'90s growth in the luxury-goods market, has led not only to Gucci's growing consumer popularity (according to one industry report, the company's worldwide sales may top $1 billion this year, up from $881 million in 1996) but also to a higher philanthropic profile, including involvement in charity events such as the annual fashion gala for AIDS Project Los Angeles, which this year will include a Gucci-backed cocktail party and dinner as well as a fashion show honoring Ford.

During the interview at the Carlyle, where Ford was dressed in dark threads and a mid-length leather jacket, he spoke about his success and, for the first time, his private life. Rumor has it that the designer's good fortune has made his manner increasingly grand and that his good looks--which in his early 20s won him work as an actor on television commercials and which have made him, according to one well-known fashion editor, "just about the only big-name designer you might want to fuck"--have begun to fade. Instead a still very attractive man with a dark receding hairline and useful amounts of fashion-biz glibness emerged. Ford can be refreshingly frank while continually reserving the right to change his mind when it comes to self-description.

About sexual preference, for instance. Given the fact that gay people dominate his business, Ford says he finds it ironic that "everyone in the fashion industry dances around questions of sexuality." He insists that he has never lied about the question, at least not lately. "In interviews no one ever asks me these questions," he says. "Usually it's about `Why did you do this shoe?'" Although Ford admits he had an identity-consolidating period in his 20s when he was so immersed in gay culture that he had few women friends, he says that gay is no longer one of the first words he would use to describe himself. Nonetheless, he seems both proud and matter-of-fact when he says, "I'm certainly gay at this particular moment in my life." That moment has lasted awhile: He's been with his boyfriend, fashion writer Richard Buckley, for ten years. Citing privacy, he says little about Buckley except that he's "a great cook" and that the couple is "very happy" together. "Maybe when I'm 60, " Ford says, "I'm going to live with a woman and have kids. I don't know. When I was 15 I went out with a woman--for several years, actually. I was completely happy then too."

Ford isn't particularly concerned that these comments may not please those who see sexual orientation as fixed rather than fluid. "At some point the whole label of gay or straight will completely disappear," he predicts. "And it will be, `Are you with a man or with a woman?' "Ford isn't arguing for androgyny here. "I hate that word," he says, "because androgyny implies sexlessness, and I'm all for--and have built my career on--clothes that are sexy."

Ironically, however, it's a sexiness derived from gender fluidity that Ford puts on the runway and in advertisements. One of the images in Gucci's current men's ready-to-wear campaign, for example, features a faunlike male sporting Tammy Faye--like amounts of eye shadow. Comments Ford: "Often I get the question, `Why do you put makeup on guys? Are they trying to be more feminine?' or `Why are you showing masculine suits on women?' I hate those two words, feminine and masculine. I mean, what are they? Why is a suit masculine and not feminine? And why is eye makeup feminine and not masculine? It's so stupid. We're just people. The guy has eye makeup on so he's more beautiful." The more we hold on to rigid notions of gender and attractiveness, Ford's work suggests, the more such notions keep constraining us. Playing with gender expectations, the designer says, can be sexy: "In their fantasies people are sometimes turned on by `soft' men and `hard' women, so fashion should be able to reflect that." Ford's most recent women's wear show illustrates this view. The fall collection features `80s-inflected leather suits with armorlike shoulders and killer high heels, a silhouette by which Ford not only celebrates feminine forcefulness but also holds a mirror to what he sees as today's "very violent" beauty ideal. "Powerful women exuding a hint of aggression can be a real turn-on," he says. "You don't have to be a dominatrix to know that."

Although Ford celebrates sexual fluidity on the runway, he recognizes the advantages that someone who is securely gay in real life can bring to design--in other words, why he and other gay designers continue to have such an impact on fashion. First, they have been largely responsible for the eroticization that has transformed the male image and men's fashion during the past two decades. "A man becoming a sex object opened a whole new door," Ford says. "If you have a group of people who are assembling images for the world and they're predominantly gay, once they found they could get away with pushing images that possibly appealed more to themselves sexually, then the door was wide open." Second, Ford observes, gay designers may actually have an advantage dressing women. While female designers, as Donna Karan and others have shown, have a more intuitive sense of how clothing feels on a woman, gay men, Ford says, may have a stronger sense of how it appears on her: "You can be slightly more objective about what looks good on a woman, at least in terms of drape and fit."

Halfway through the interview, Ford seems to grow a little tired of questions concerning sexuality and fashion, particularly when the conversation turns to his personal history. Is he, in fact, a little tired of being gay? Does he yearn for a return to Studio 54 days, when the idea of going home with a guy was daring and new? Not at all, he replies. He mentions that he has lived in Europe for the past eight years (Gucci is based in Florence, Italy, though the peripatetic Ford officially lives in Paris), where private morals are viewed less puritanically than they are in America. Proclaiming one's gayness is not seen as so politically pressing an issue, and Ford says it is this cultural difference rather than any fear of homophobia within the fashion industry (or, since Gucci is a publicly traded company, worry about investors) that accounts for his decision not to talk much about his sexuality until now. "I've never had anyone at any job tell me what I could do or say," he says proudly. This attitude, he confesses, stems from his rosy childhood, when his parents encouraged him to be expressive and his Auntie Mame-like paternal grandmother, who lives in New Mexico, positively insisted on it. His grandmother's madcap spirit seemed to be hovering when, quite out of left field, Ford related a bit of trivia that explains his predilection for the kind of stiletto shoes that appeared in his last women's show. "Do you know the thing about the baboons?" he asks. "Female baboons, when they're sexually aroused, walk around on their tiptoes." He pauses. "Men find women in high heels incredibly sexy."

"Tom's lucky if he's escaped any muzzling or any homophobia," says Amy Spindler, chief fashion critic for The New York Times. "He's certainly been in the business long enough to have known otherwise." Spindler is referring not only to Ford's career over the past 12 years--during which time he worked with Chloe in Paris as well as with American labels Cathy Hardwick and Perry Ellis before joining Gucci--but also to fashion's sexual climate during part of that period. "There was a time five or six years ago when male designers were having trouble getting financial backing," Spindler says, "because backers were afraid that AIDS made them too risky an investment. That climate has been lifting."

Fashion's sexual climate has been changing for many reasons. According to Spindler, one of them is generational. For example, fashion's latest darling, the 20-something Alexander McQueen, has been comfortably out since early in his career; the Englishman has been seen at fashion shows holding hands with his boyfriend even as more established names, some only a few years older than McQueen, continue to draw a veil over the subject. A less analyzed reason for the sexual shift has to do with AIDS. Spindler thinks the hope created by the protease-based treatments may have helped make sex more blatant again on the runway and in the culture generally. "One of the reasons this is Tom's moment is that he has recognized that," she says.

For his part, Ford thinks fashion's sexual openness began before the advent of protease inhibitors, attributing it instead to a building realization that AIDS was not going to go away soon and that people had to go on living. "All you can ever say at any moment in time is, I'm alive, he's alive, she's alive," he says. "There are no guarantees. You could never drink and never smoke and never have sex, and you could drop dead tomorrow." His fashion philosophy also celebrates evanescence: "The moment of a great dress is a moment. Not even a week or a month. It's gone at the end of the party."

When asked whether his media popularity has to do with fashion's renewed sense of hedonism, Ford answers, "I hope so. So much of what has happened really comes back to AIDS. Only years from now will we see clearly the dramatic effect on fashion, on art, on everything that AIDS had. I don't mean just in the gay community but in a really broad cultural sense. We went through a period of pulling back, and I hope we're recovering from that. Not in the sense of not having to worry about AIDS anymore but in recognizing that it's OK to still be sexual, it's OK to go out and find someone you like and have some sort of sexual relationship with that person, but it's a different kind of sexual relationship. You still obviously need to be very careful, but it's a sort of recovery."

Ford's recommended balance between caution and indulgence is reflected in his own life. His work may suggest a return to sensuality, but he himself works hard with AIDS organizations that counsel caution. He is reluctant to describe these activities. "I am financially supportive to quite a few AIDS organizations," he says, "but I always do it anonymously. Given my financial position"--after Gucci issued its first public stock offering, in October 1995, Ford became a very wealthy man--"I can do a lot more than a lot of people."

Occasionally Ford's efforts become conspicuous. In May he was involved with a fund-raiser for the New York-based AIDS charity God's Love We Deliver, and the APLA extravaganza is scheduled for June 5. During the past few years, the latter organization has come under some criticism. Although there have long been questions raised about the excesses associated with several high-level AIDS fund-raisers, to some people the 1993 APLA evening honoring Calvin Klein--and, to a lesser degree, last year's tribute to Oldham--exemplified the moment when the opulence became too gilded. APLA is, in fact, embroiled in a lawsuit filed against Michael Anketell, a former employee who, in an excerpt from an unpublished book manuscript that ran in Poz magazine, alleged misuse of funds at several such events.

In the wake of this contretemps, Ford understandably has no wish to discuss the fashion event's recent history; it seems to interest him about as much as last year's collections do. He is pleased that his personal participation and Gucci's corporate sponsorship will produce publicity both for the company and for APLA, adding, "We're going to raise more money for AIDS Project Los Angeles than they've ever raised before. I'm very determined to do that."

Ford is also determined to keep expanding all 11 of Gucci's divisions, including the rapidly growing ready-to-wear segment and even a revitalized home-products line as well as the best-selling accessories lines (which still account for a majority of the company's sales). He also talks of eventually becoming a movie director: A film, after all, can last longer than even the most influential new look. "I don't want to wake up," he says, "and be a miserable 60-year-old fashion designer worrying whether the skirt should be six inches above the knee."