Micro-minis, slinky trouser suits, and flyaway caftans slit to the hip—what else could this be but the sexy-and-glamour legacy of Tom Ford? Peter Hawkings, Ford’s longtime menswear designer, now the brand’s creative director, is a Brit who knows every page of his former boss’s playbook, going back to the heady 1990s and aughts of the Gucci years.
Now Hawkings has consolidated the women’s and men’s design teams in London—a homecoming of sorts, as at one time Ford used to base his Gucci studio in the city. Which is why the in-person viewing of the resort collection in these pictures took place on rails in the Tom Ford store on Sloane Street, guided by Hawkings’s design director Christopher Rawstron.
Leafing through the alternating content of barely-there body-revealing pieces, slick lurex-shot tailoring, and cotton-drill jumpsuits, Rawstron said that Hawkings had taken a video documentary about Veruschka—the great German model and artist Vera von Lehndorff—as his starting point. “ Kind of late ’60s, early ’70s, kind of [Richard] Avedon.”
Those heady days of youthquake fashion moved speedily from graphic minis to hotpants and hipster bootlegs and into louche hippie maximalism. The cruise collection contains a whiff of that recipe. Verushcka nerds may clock Hawkings’s coded references to a famous image of her wearing an Yves Saint Laurent 1976 safari jacket or to an A-line micro-dress with a cross-ribbon neckline. The result: a kind of sundowner cocktail of a contemporary collection infused with a dash of nostalgia for excess and escapism.