The Edit | Fall 2026
Image via Dazed
The Tom Ford Era Is Back. I, For One, Am Here For It
I have been waiting thirty years for this.
Not literally. But the version of me who taped the Gucci Fall/Winter 1995 campaign to a bedroom wall — Amber Valletta in that cobalt mohair coat, satin shirt unbuttoned to the belt, the double G sitting exactly where a double G should sit — has been waiting. That campaign was the moment Tom Ford's vision for the house finally clicked into place. Velvet hipsters. Satin. Sex as a silhouette. It rewrote what a Gucci woman looked like, and it rewrote what I wanted to look like.
This fall, that woman is back on the runway. And she brought Kate.
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Image via Gucci
Let's talk about the gown.
Kate Moss closed Demna's first Gucci show in Milan wearing a floor-length black sequin column — long sleeves, mock neck, quiet from the front. Then she turned. The back drops clean to the base of the spine, and the whole room understood the reference at once.
That open, slinky, sequined back is Tom Ford Gucci, 1995 — the exact register of the original. And in the campaign film she is lip-syncing to "Wicked Game" in front of a green velvet curtain, arms overhead, a lone microphone stand, the room dressed like a hotel lounge that stopped serving hours ago. It is cinematic in the way the '90s campaigns were cinematic: one woman, one gesture, no explanation.
Gucci | Tom Ford Era | Runway 1994 | Image via Dazed
I wrote in The House of Symbols that Gucci is built on a vocabulary — the horsebit, the bamboo, the web stripe, the interlocking G. What Demna is doing is not reinvention. He's reading the archive out loud. The body-con lines, the slim trouser, the long clingy dress, the sequin gown on the woman who was the '90s — every one of these is a symbol, and he is using them fluently.
Fall, then, is a language I already speak. Satin shirting worn open. A narrow velvet trouser. A single slinky evening column that does its work from behind. If you have a Tom Ford–era Gucci piece in your archive, this is the season to take it out of the garment bag. If you don't, this is the season to source one — and I would rather you buy the 1996 velvet than the 2026 interpretation of it.
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