THE FORD MACHINE AT WORK

Tom Ford was recently honoured with an outstanding achievement award at The British Fashion Council's Awards 2024. What's next for this American fashion designer, businessman and filmmaker? Raising his son in the UK, he says.

- Sarah Mower

It's quite a day to be interviewing one of the most prominent Americans in London. I'm meeting Tom Fordde - signer, beauty-business genius, movie - maker, man of many lives-on the morning the Trump election news has just hit. He has chosen a private room at Scott's in Mayfair for our rendezvous. This is the only interview he says he'll give ahead of the outstanding achievement award he'll be receiving from the hands of Anna Wintour - at the Fashion Awards at the Royal Albert Hall on Monday, December 2.

He arrives, invisibly 63, suave, smooth, slim as ever, with a charming greeting-then suddenly freezes with a look of horror. It's the lighting. "Oh no! This is waaay too bright!" A waiter materialises to fiddle with a dimmer hidden in a cupboard. "Lower. Lower. Lower. No. Lower!" Ford goes. Then he's up in the cupboard himself. "Now that's it." Ford has pulled an election all-nighter. "I've only just come from a nap. Which you always have to be careful about at my age," he mock-apologises, miming face creases.

But of course there is no crease on the Ford visage, nor anywhere else on his person. He's wearing his Tom Ford uniform: black one-button velvet jacket, whittled waist, two precise peaks of white pocket handkerchief, narrow grey trousers, black Chelsea boots. I think he also has on a white pleat-front evening shirt. Three buttons are undone over a hairy chest, which I find myself, very primly, very Englishly, trying not to look at for two and a half hours.