Micro-minis, slinky trouser fits, and flyaway caftans slit to the hip—what else might this be however the sexy-and-glamour legacy of Tom Ford? Peter Hawkings, Ford’s longtime menswear designer, now the model’s artistic director, is a Brit who is aware of each web page of his former boss’s playbook, going again to the heady Nineteen Nineties and aughts of the Gucci years.
Now Hawkings has consolidated the ladies’s and males’s design groups in London—a homecoming of types, as at one time Ford used to base his Gucci studio within the metropolis. Which is why the in-person viewing of the resort assortment in these photos happened on rails within the Tom Ford retailer on Sloane Road, guided by Hawkings’s design director Christopher Rawstron.
Leafing by way of the alternating content material of barely-there body-revealing items, slick lurex-shot tailoring, and cotton-drill jumpsuits, Rawstron mentioned that Hawkings had taken a video documentary about Veruschka—the nice German mannequin and artist Vera von Lehndorff—as his start line. “ Sort of late ’60s, early ’70s, type of [Richard] Avedon.”
These heady days of youthquake style moved speedily from graphic minis to hotpants and hipster bootlegs and into louche hippie maximalism. The cruise assortment incorporates a whiff of that recipe. Verushcka nerds could clock Hawkings’s coded references to a well-known picture of her sporting an Yves Saint Laurent 1976 safari jacket or to an A-line micro-dress with a cross-ribbon neckline. The end result: a type of sundowner cocktail of a recent assortment infused with a touch of nostalgia for extra and escapism.
