Tom Ford

Born in Austin, Texas and trained at Parsons, Tom Ford joined Gucci in 1990 as womenswear designer and was promoted to creative director in 1994. Over the next decade he resurrected the bankrupt Florentine house with hyper-sexualised glamour — velvet hipsters, satin shirts, the white halter dress — turning Gucci into a multi-billion-dollar engine and, after the 1999 YSL acquisition, taking on Saint Laurent Rive Gauche from 2000. He left both houses in 2004 after a power struggle with PPR. In 2005 he launched Tom Ford as a men's tailoring and beauty house, expanded to women's in 2010, directed two feature films (A Single Man, Nocturnal Animals), and sold the company to Estée Lauder in 2022 for $2.8B — staying on as creative until 2023. He remains the textbook case of the designer-as-CEO.