5 months after Estée Lauder purchased the Tom Ford label for $2.8 billion, the query of whether or not the designer would proceed working together with his eponymous model has been answered. On Wednesday, the model launched pictures and movies of Ford’s last assortment.

In a marketing campaign photographed by Steven Klein, fashions like Joan Smalls, Karen Elson, and Amber Valletta pose in glass packing containers as a suit-clad Ford walks previous. The fashions, lots of whom have labored with Ford since his model’s debut in 2010, weren’t the one injection of nostalgia to the presentation. Tom Ford’s autumn/winter 2023 assortment options reissued variations of a few of his biggest hits all through the previous 13 years. Each bit acts as a rearview mirror trying into the previous. There’s the white, caped robe Gwyneth Paltrow wore to the Oscars in 2012, a colour blocked sequin costume from spring 2016, the spring 2020 breastplate Zendaya donned for the Critics Selection Awards that 12 months. Little assertion was delivered with the gathering, however the garments communicate for themselves. It’s a “The place’s Waldo” of Ford’s designs, a mini retrospective of his work at Tom Ford, in addition to YSL and Gucci.

In a video, additionally shot by Klein, Smalls, Elson, Valletta, Karlie Kloss, and others are wearing black, actually mourning the designer. Elson sings an aria in black lace, Kloss peeps by way of a veil, Valletta’s drops to the ground in anguish, all as Ford appears on. It’s a theatrical farewell to a person who has been moonlighting as a filmmaker for years.

When the sale to Estée Lauder was initially made public again in November 2022, it was introduced that Ford would keep on because the inventive lead till the tip of 2023. Nevertheless it’s solely April, and he’s already saying goodbye. What’s subsequent for the designer is unclear—maybe extra of a concentrate on movie?—as is the query of who will take his place. In accordance with the New York Occasions, bets are on Peter Hawkings, the model’s menswear designer.

“The day I don’t like to do it, I’ll promote it,” Ford advised Sarah Mower at Vogue of his model again when it initially launched in 2010. “As a result of we’re all solely right here for a short while, and nothing we do or make has any permanence in any respect. I care now as a result of I’m doing it. I need to be pleased with what I do. Which can be 10 or 20 years; who is aware of?” It appears this time, 13 was the fortunate quantity.