Lush, Leather and Luxurious: It's Tom Ford

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/18/fashion/lush-leather-and-luxury-its-tom-ford.html

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LONDON — The center of this city is bubbling like Champagne with the international superrich. While native Londoners fight with their umbrellas and dart into the Underground, across Mayfair and Knightsbridge, the cars of the wealthy purr up to shiny restaurants and their drivers stagger under the weight of branded bags from the day’s shopping haul.

Tom Ford is after this high net worth crowd.

They gathered on Sunday at his new Knightsbridge women’s store, where the black-chocolate dark stairway leads to a polished upper floor — all pink suede pumps and fluffy black and white furs. Fragrant with the perfumes wafting from the beauty area downstairs, this store is No. 89 of a rollout of 100 stores. Earlier this month came Chicago and Dallas (where else?).

And so to the show. The décor with its mirrored walls (no gilt trip, as in last season’s fancy mansion) was Gucci redux. The show followed the exact template of “Tom” presentations: Outerwear, strong and body conscious, with a sexy vibe; pause; dim the lights; evening wear, soft, bondage-wrapped, with full-on sexiness.

Then Mr. Ford himself, impeccably elegant in a form-fitting suit, takes his bow.

And the clothes? For any woman who believes that the 1980s (preferably in Dallas) was the way to go, here was greed-is-good once again. The tan leather was soft, buttery, chevron-stitched, with the look of the seats in an über-expensive car. The skirts had high-rise hemlines on models who, by today’s waif standards, looked positively beefy. They strode out, in their fetish laced ankle boots, owning the world.

But the big, curvy women sashaying down the runway were no babes. They looked like they might manage Russian mines or own petroleum plants in Baku. (And, yes, Mr. Ford already has a store in the wealthy capital of Azerbaijan.)

There was a touch of the ’80s in dresses where bondage straps were crisscrossed over mesh to reveal skin. An impeccably tailored YSL-style tuxedo, its wool jacket morphing to shiny satin, led to a glitter gulch of shiny dresses, including metallic mesh with what looked like a wolf’s head woven into the neckline. These women were surely man-eaters.

Among the whimsical, witty and ironic offerings of young London designers, the Ford show seemed like a fashion juggernaut. But he knows his woman and that she dresses to kill.