Tom Ford Bids a Final Adieu with an Assist From Steven Klein and Some of His Favorite Muses 

“Mr. Ford Returns,” announced a spread in Vogue’s December 2010 issue. The feature offered a first look at Tom Ford’s highly anticipated spring 2011 collection, which marked the designer’s runway comeback after he parted ways with Kering (then Gucci Group) in 2004. The story starred the likes of Joan Smalls, Karen Elson, and Amber Valletta, all donning looks from his women’s ready-to-wear debut. 

Today, just over a dozen years later, Tom Ford is saying goodbye to his eponymous label with the launch of one final campaign that sees him take a literal, and fittingly cinematic, trip down memory lane. In a full circle moment, the trio of high-gloss videos shot by Steven Klein include—you guessed it—Smalls, Elson, and Valletta, together with other familiar faces from his original cast. 

For that September 2010 debut, Ford staged an exclusive, extremely intimate show at his store on Madison Avenue, and didn’t release any photos. He’d always been famous for starry front rows, but this time the celebrities were on the runway. Beyoncé, Stella Tennant, Karlie Kloss, and Julianne Moore, his close friend and the lead of his debut film A Single Man, dropped everything and modeled for him. 

Fall 2023 is Ford’s last collection for his brand after selling to Estée Lauder in a deal valued at $2.8 billion. Watching the campaign videos, fans will spot callbacks to that first women’s lineup and the many iconic fashion moments that have come since. They’re all intentional: In celebration of the remarkable company he built, Ford revisited some of his favorite looks. See on Kloss the broken mirror sheath he made for spring 2014, and on Valletta the metallic colorblock bodycon dress he presented for spring 2016. There’s a remake of the white caped column gown he made for Gwyneth Paltrow at the 2012 Oscar’s, a version of the spring 2020 fuchsia breastplate and skirt combo, most famously worn by Zendaya, and even a redo of the iconic velvet suit dating back to his Gucci days (here in blue paired with a tonal silk button-down similar to the Gucci version Madonna wore at the 1996 VMA’s).

In the “Mr. Ford Returns” feature from all those years ago, Sarah Mower wrote that the designer had once told her he was wary of putting his own name on a label because he feared that one day, if he ever handed control of it to someone else, he’d “hate everything” carrying his name. By the time of the article, Ford told Mower that he’d changed his mind: “The day I don’t love to do it, I’ll sell it. Because we’re all only here for a little while, and nothing we do or make has any permanence at all,” he said, “I care now because I’m doing it. I want to be proud of what I do. Which may be 10 or 20 years; who knows?” 

If this final campaign says anything, it’s that Mr. Ford’s work does have permanence—the many pieces he’s designed that are now ingrained in pop culture history are evidence of that.