– revolutionised fashion with his glamorously sexy A/W96 collection for Gucci. Ten years later, he did the same for beauty, launching his eponymous brand one year after leaving the Italian fashion house.
Ford aimed high from the get-go and, by 2014, he had built his beauty brand into a multi-million-dollar behemoth. And while his assertion then that he wanted to build it into a $3bn business might have seemed a reach too high, it turns out he was right on the money: last year, Estée Lauder made one of the biggest acquisitions in industry history by purchasing Tom Ford for $2.8bn.