Fashion | Tom Ford

Born in 1961, Tom Ford was a very fastidious boy that cultured his obsessive nature any chance he could get. He grew into a man of great creative, and otherwise, successes. And that’s just in his early 30s. How heady that probably was. At least some of the time. Then he walked away. Pursued his dream of film making and eventually came back to fashion as his own man, under his own name, and wiser. The “Tom Ford OWN Visionaries” documentary shows a man of great talent with compulsive drive to create and work, with an almost singular point of view and an awareness of his accomplishments, but one not without fragility and grown self-awareness. As a public persona, he puts a very good front. He doesn’t have to. And concludes like a belly rubbing happy sage, “I know one day, I’ll be irrelevant, because no matter how hard you try, there is a cultural window where it is your moment, you’re in that space and you can cling to it and cling to it and cling to it, but eventually your window’s gone, your time on earth is finished, you might as well leave … I could absolutely die tomorrow, I would not care, because I feel like I’ve lived, I feel like I’ve had a great life, I feel like I’ve experienced everything I could experience in my life. I don’t want to die, there’s lots of other things I’d like to do; I’d like to think my window is not gone quite yet, but I’m comfortable enough, and in peace enough with having lived and having experienced that death doesn’t freak me out at all. Nothing, nothing lasts. And that’s in a way the beauty of it all, once you can accept that nothing lasts. And at this point in time, I’m not going to do anything that’s not fun … I’m not going to waste any more time. If it’s not fun, I’m not going to do it.” Reminds me of Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement address. Yes, two very exacting individuals, but with Buddhist notion of impermanence. I’ll take it.