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Tom Ford has long been tasked with closing out New York Fashion Week, meaning his collections often leave a lasting impression about what the season represented. This was certainly the case for spring summer ‘22, where Ford’s sporty-meets-glam offering embodied the push-pull dichotomy of the past week of shows, at once forward-thinking and optimistic and rooted in everyday pragmatism. We saw it from the get-go: Sequinned sports tanks and basketball shorts were worn with slouchy satin blazers or ruched satin track pants in a so-bad-it’s-good colour palette of chestnut, gold, pink, electric blue, and lime.
And the Noughties were back on the menu, Ford having himself defined much of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s during his formidable reign as creative director of Gucci. Low-rise satin cargo pants were worn with crop tops, lace-up sandals, and lashings of gold jewellery. There were capri pants worn with gold lamè shoulder bags (Carrie Bradshaw eat your heart out), and a royal blue velvet suit reminiscent of the iconic red design Ford created at Gucci back in 1996—though this time it was updated with a three-quarter length trouser.
“I think that this is a hopeful collection and at a moment when we all need hope,” Ford revealed in the show notes. “We need that now more than ever.” It was a message that resonated with his A-List crowd—among them Jennifer Hudson, Julianne Moore, and Dan Levy—who flocked to the David H. Koch Theatre in the Lincoln Centre in spite of the compulsory mask-wearing mandate. What we’ve missed more than anything in the last year is the joy of spontaneous human connection, the thrill of the unexpected, the niggling excitement that something big may be about to happen. Who better to encapsulate those feelings than Mr. Ford, long the arbiter of unapologetic American glamour? The show finished with a gold-and-silver clad model carrying a bouquet of white flowers down the runway. Here’s hoping the era of freewheeling disco brides is soon upon us.
