How Fatherhood Has Changed Tom Ford: Dirty Suits, Donut Binges, & Only 2 Baths A Day (Instead of 4)
A notorious perfectionist, Tom Ford has admitted that his precise ways have been upended by having a child. In a recent interview with the Evening Standard, the mega designer reveals that since having two-and-a-half-year-old Jack, he has not worked out once, his typically pristine abodes are riddled with toys, and he has cut back his four-a-day-bath ritual down to two. Also, he wears dirty suits!
When asked what he was wearing during the hour-long interview, Ford replied, “This old dirty suit! I literally just pick up the suit from the night before and put it on. Sometimes I have another uniform — jeans, a jean shirt and a different jacket — and it’s one or the other of those outfits. I used to make more of an effort in the mornings but I don’t any more.”
What an admission from a man who once likened his perfectionism to “a mental illness.” But it is clear that Ford’s focus is now elsewhere. He even confides to finding beauty in the chaos, calling fatherhood “meditative.” “…It’s stress that’s not about you,” he says. “It’s stress worrying and thinking about your child, which takes your mind off your work or what you were doing that day or what such-and-such said that pissed you off because you’re thinking about your kid. It’s a break from yourself.”
While his roots are firmly planted at the home he shares with his husband Richard Buckley and their son — he gave up alcohol a while ago and says that’d be much prefer to be in bed by 10pm with a book than out at a glammy fashion event — his business is also thriving. On Monday, the recent winner of the CFDA’s Menswear Designer of the Year will present his Spring/Summer 2016 Menswear collection in London, and he’s also about to working on his second feature film, Nocturnal Animals, starring Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal. “I wrote the screenplay, I’m directing it, I’m producing it and I’m financing it,” Ford says.
Forget the toys and the dirty suits, if there is one thing that is holding up Ford from his supreme perfection of yesteryear it would be a doughnut. “…If I’m in America, Hostess Donettes — those cheap little white powdery things. I mean, if I even see them, I have to eat the pack!”
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