Micro-minis, figure-hugging trouser suits and loose kaftans with a slit up to the hip: what else could this be than Tom Ford’s sexy and glamorous legacy? Peter Hawkings, Ford’s menswear designer and now the brand’s creative director, is a Brit who knows every page of his former boss’s playbook, which stretches back to the heady 1990s and the Gucci years.
Now Hawkings has consolidated the women’s and men’s design teams in London – a homecoming of sorts, as Ford once based his Gucci studio in the city. That’s why the in-person viewing of the resort collection in these photos took place on rails at the Tom Ford store on Sloane Street, led by Hawkings’ design director Christopher Rawstron.
Browsing through the varied content of barely-there pieces, tight lurex waists and cotton jumpsuits, Rawstron said Hawkings used a video documentary about Veruschka – the great German model and artist Vera von Lehndorff – as his starting point. “A bit like the late sixties, early seventies, something like that [Richard] Avedon.”
Those heady days of youth fashion quickly moved from graphic minis to hot pants and hipster bootlegs to seedy hippie maximalism. The cruise collection contains a touch of that recipe. Verushcka nerds might recognize Hawkings’ coded references to a famous image of her wearing a 1976 Yves Saint Laurent safari jacket, or to an A-line micro dress with a crossover neckline. The result: a kind of sundowner cocktail from a contemporary collection infused with a touch of nostalgia for excess and escapism.