The revolution was over by the time Tom Ford started working in the fashion world. The expensive fashion design houses such as Channel, Yves Saint Laurent, and Christian Dior, which earned money by designing and making very expensive custom clothes, had lost many of their wealthy customers. To stay in business, they started selling more reasonably priced ready-to-wear clothing along with a wide range of accessories , that is, related products such as shoes, bags, watches. All of these products needed to blend  with the clothing and with each other so that they made up a brand that everyone would recognize and wanted to buy. Though they did not use that name, each company needed a "master designer." Born in Texas and growing up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Ford had a diverse background in the arts. Soon after completing high school, he moved to New York, where he studied art history, trained as an actor, and worked as a model. Following that, Ford completed a program in indoor design, but later decided that he was more interested in designing clothes than in decorating house. He was hired by the firm Cathy Hardwick in 1986, where he began to work as a fashion designer. His talent stood out from the rest and soon he moved to Perry Ellis, where he became design director. Then in 1990 he made an important move by taking a position with the New York branch of Gucci, the famous design house based in Milan, Italy. During his first years at Gucci, the company was going through a very difficult period. Its products were once considered highly desirable, and were worn by famous women such as Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, and Jacqueline Kennedy. However, by the early 1990s they had lost their reputation for quality. Other producers had started making cheap, widely available imitations of the brand, and the sales of Gucci's own products had dropped. Things were so bad at one point that Ford was almost fired. However, some people at the company believed in his talent, and in 1994 they hired him to work in Milan as the creative director for the entire company. In this position Ford had artistic control over all of the company's products, as well as its advertising and the design of its stores. Under Ford's direction, Gucci's reputation for cutting-edge style soon returned, and the company began to recover. The style shows starting in 1994 were wildly successful. People loved the low-cut velvet pants, unbuttoned silk shirts, and shiny boots in metallic color1s. By 1999 Gucci, which had almost gone out of business, was worth over $4 billion. When Gucci bought Yves Saint Laurent , Ford became creative director for that fashion house while continuing to design for Gucci. When asked how he would be able to keep the two styles apart, Ford said it wasn't a problem and offered a comparison. Yves Saint Laurent was like Catherine Deneuve, he said while Gucci was more like Sophia Loren. Both are sexy and beautiful women, but with very different styles.  Ford left Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent in 2004 to form his own company called simply "Tom Ford". Not long after, he was working together with cosmetics producer Estee Lauder to bring out new beauty products, and then developed and sold a perfume  under his own name. His plans for the future? Ford says that someday he'd definitely like to make a film. He puts it his way: "That is the main design project. You don't just get to design what people wear, but you design the whole world and whether characters get to live or die. There is what fashion lacks. In the future, Tom Ford hopes to   _  .
create a perfume make a movie write a book start a company