The brand may have a new designer, but old Tom Ford is new Tom Ford. Let’s start from Gucci

Big changes at Tom Ford were not exactly expected leading up to the brand’s “highly anticipated” spring/summer 2024 show in Milan. The now-Estee-Lauder-owned label’s new guy Peter Hawkings, a veteran employee who has worked with Mr Ford for 25 years, was supposed to bring the name into a new era. But he did not. It is possible that the Tom Ford style of sex, glamour, and retro-pertoire has, through the decades, seeped deep into Mr Hawkings’s pores. And now he breathes Tom Ford stertorously. Yet, his debut’s charmless homage seemed more like boot-licking: To prove that he could be just like his former boss, and, therefore, a worthy successor. So the collection had to be steep in the glory days of Tom Ford. In the show notes, the brand called Mr Hawkings’s barefaced fawning over the Tom Ford of the past—and, frankly, present—“an act of continuity”.

The need for brand-identity cohesion is understandable, but the continuation of something that has possibly reached saturation point? Mr Ford had shown some “iconic” looks at the height of his career, brought skin-baring sexiness to a point that it was—and still is—dubbed somewhat tragically “trademark”, and amplified American-style glamorama for parties and after-parties, forming the crux of what he offered, going back to his Gucci years. All these play-backs were so evident even in Mr Ford’s last show that he seemed to be parodying himself. How much of the good of the past can you really throw into a mix that purports to now give the label a fresh spin without it looking stale, vapid, rehashed? Or devoid of real ideas? For Mr Hawkings, unknown until he was appointed in April, quite a lot. On the runway, there was, thankfully, no disco beat that the late Dan Hartman would enthusiastically approve or anything that recall, without a smidgen of wit, Studio 54.

But the savour of the Seventies hung in the air like stale Tom Ford perfume, even in the scented show space. Mr Hawkings wasted no time in proving that he was right for the job by delving straight into the past work of his former boss. Just after the opening look, we were thrust into the familiar: Dresses so clearly from Mr Ford’s 1996 all-sex-up-with-somewhere-to-go Gucci collection. Mr Hawking referenced the last six dresses (the final piece of the sextet worn by the still-modelling Kate Moss) that were inspired by Halston, except that Mr Hawkings’s were now in black. And the belts-as-waist jewellery were there too as evocative of the past as the way the dresses were presently worn. But those dresses were not the only looks from 1996 that Mr Hawkings mined. There were, too, those velvet suits under which silk shirts were worn unbuttoned to the navel, a look that would be made famous (and reprised in 2021 at the Gucci Love Parade show) by Gwyneth Paltrow. There are those for whom Tom Ford’s Gucci is the veritable security blanket.

Mr Hawkings’s confidence came under the canonical aegis of more than Gucci by Tom Ford. There was Saint Laurent by Tom Ford (satin safari jacket and such!) and Tom Ford by Tom Ford (leather biker jackets and such!). After a while everything became a blur: Just Tom Ford. It was as if Mr Ford had not left. Not only did Mr Hawkings put out a debut collection that could have been executed by the brand founder’s very own hands, he seemed to want to be Tom Ford. In his appearance at the end of the show, he took his bow in a foppish white suit with wide lapels and a V-neck T-shirt, made all the more authentic with a pair of squarish, vintage-y frames. Very quickly, it dawned on us that the collection shared the same adjective in the name of the Tom Ford 2018 fragrance perfumed after the cherry: Lost.