Tom Ford: Daily Routine

From blackout nights to candlelit mornings, Tom Ford traded cocktails for coffee — and never looked sharper.

Around the same time that he was working as the Creative Director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, fashion designer Tom Ford admitted that he was drunk all the time. “I was a highly functioning alcoholic,” he confessed in a Mr Porter interview. “I think I did a lot of things creatively that I probably wouldn’t have done had I been sober. In the end, they kind of all worked to my advantage.”

Under Ford’s creative direction, Gucci grew from a struggling fashion house in the early ’90s to being valued at more than $4 billion in 1999. “He controlled everything — not just the design, not just the runway shows, but the stores, the advertising, the packaging, the bags that people carried out the doors,” said Patrick McCarthy, chairman of the fashion publisher Fairchild Publications. “He was a complete control freak, and that’s what made the company successful.”