Movie director Tom Ford is a singular man
When Tom Ford was growing up in Texas, men were encouraged to cross their legs in a specific manner. We are sitting across from one another in one of London’s Soho hotels and the fashion designer turned filmmaker demonstrates. “You could not cross your legs like this,” he says, perching the inside of his right knee on top of his left knee. “That was considered effeminate. Men crossed their legs like this.” He rests the outside of his right ankle on the left knee. “That was how real men did it.” His youth in the Lone Star state was frustrating at times. After all, he only realised he was gay when he reached his late teens and had relocated to New York to study art history at NYU (though he dropped out after a year to act in television commercials).
“When I was a kid in Texas, I didn’t necessarily fit in,” says the 55-year-old. “When I realised I was gay it was like, ‘Oh, that explains a lot.’ Living in Texas and in New Mexico, the first thing I wanted to do was to get out of there. There were lots of arbitrary rules about masculinity.”
