Tom Ford’s Fall/Winter 2014 ready-to-wear collection begged the question: when is leopard skin, loud red fur, and other wild animal-inspired designs considered tacky? And when are they considered cool?
The furry creature looks presented in Ford’s diverse show Monday didn’t seem to fit into one camp or the other. Perhaps the designer wanted to blur the lines between the two in a sort of trashy-cool aesthetic. With over-sized, loud fur coats in garish colors and little furry skirt ensembles that lacked shape and style, that blend was exactly what Ford achieved.
But the collection had much more to it than that. It ran the gamut from abstract, original eveningwear to a sort of sixties-inspired minimalism. Think pencil-like silhouettes of tight mini-ish skirts in black and white, some of which looked sassy and sexy, while others looked, well, tacky. Consider a furry sweatshirt worn with a tight black skirt and long boots, which, if not designed by Tom Ford, may have looked cheap.
More tongue-in-cheek was a new twist on the cheerleader uniform. Models sported Tom Ford logoed dresses—adorned with a witty jab at Jay Z’s rap, “I don’t pop Molly, I rock Tom Ford"—with large glitzy numbers that were reminiscent of American Football shirts. It was a “knock-off of the knock-off,” Ford said, turning a sixty dollar t-shirt into a six-thousand-dollar sequined number.
The show had an elegant, stylish finale with a series of red and black evening designs that looked chic, sometimes abstract, and deliberately lop-sided and artsy.
