Tom Ford: ‘I’d be dead now if I didn’t stop drinking and doing drugs

Tom Ford

DESIGNER and director Tom Ford has opened up on his battle with depression, saying he thinks he would be dead now if he didn’t give up alcohol and drugs.

The 53-year-old says he had a “midlife crisis” when he left Gucci in 2004, the fashion house he helped bring back from bankruptcy during his 10 years there as creative director.

“I became quite depressed. When you’re depressed you drink more and when you drink more you get more depressed. And along with the drinks there were drugs. And when you have that kind of high you also have that kind of low. And I didn’t have a child and I didn’t have — y’know for a couple of years — a career,” he told the Evening Standard. “My life ... I honestly don’t think I’d be alive if I hadn’t stopped drinking.”

He says living in London, where he believes the culture of drinking is rampant, didn’t help the situation.

“You can very easily consume ten drinks a day and be considered absolutely normal. You go to lunch, have a couple of drinks. Come five o’clock at the office, we’d have a couple of drinks. Then I’d get dressed for dinner, couple of drinks while I was getting dressed. Go out, three drinks at dinner. Going out to a club after that, three more. Add that up, you’re at like ten, 12,” he said. “Sometimes I’d say to my friends, ‘I think I have a drinking problem’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, you don’t have a drinking problem! Have another drink!’ Once I stopped drinking I found this clarity, which can be painful for a while but my life has just fallen into place. I built a business, made a movie, had a child, I’m making another movie,” he said.

Ford managed to give up booze entirely, saying it helped him focus on his fashion label, and be a father to his two-year-old son Jack he shares with his partner of 29 years, Richard Buckley.

He is just about to start filming his second movie, Nocturnal Animals with Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams. It will be his first film since the 2009 hit A Single Man, which starred Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.

He says he relaxes nowadays by having up to five baths a day.

“I resolve a lot of things in the bath,” he said.

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