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“The last thing I want to see are serious clothes,” Tom Ford tells Vogue of his attitude towards designing his spring 2021 collection. “I think we need an escape. I think we want to smile. I know what’s going on in our world right now doesn’t make us want to smile, so that’s what I’ve done: hopeful clothes that make you smile.”
With flouncy party dresses, tie-dyed caftans, and bikini tops layered under button-ups, he did just that. True to Ford’s fully realized approach, the beauty was just as feel-good, paying homage to the ’70s. More specifically, he riffed on the colorful world that illustrator Antonio Lopez cultivated as immortalized in a recent documentary about his life and collaborations with model-muses Pat Cleveland and Donna Jordan.
The spring look book starred models Marjan Jonkman and Makala Johnson as Cleveland and Jordan’s modern-day counterparts. As such, each girl donned the disco-beauty uniform: Lids washed in an iridescent cornflower shadow, cheeks draped in hot pink blush, and lips slicked with bright fuchsia lip gloss. Conjuring a similar mood were their individual hair looks, Jonkman’s white platinum shag—center-parted with feather layers—was a wink at Jordan’s peroxide coif, while Johnson’s dark lengths were slicked back in a sculptural low knot like Cleveland often wore.
Between Miley Cyrus’s “Midnight Sky” music video and the Brooklyn Museum’s recently reopened Studio 54: Night Magic exhibit, the fantasy makeup of the disco era is capturing the imagination. The irony that there are no doormen to impress or dance floors to fill is clear, but if anyone can help fulfill the fantasy, who better than Ford?
