FALL 2014 MENSWEAR Tom Ford

Tom Ford is a great example of fashion's action/reaction dialectic. After a Spring collection saturated with intense, thrilling color, he went black for Fall. And, following seasons of hyperattenuated tailoring, he showed only two suits this time round, throwing the emphasis solidly on sportswear, "to capture the other side of my customer's life," as he sagely put it during today's presentation. And such solid sportswear! Voluminous topcoats swirled around a stovepipe silhouette; a coyote-lined parka wrapped a bouclé-like sweater (yarn hand-spun in Peru, hand-knitted in Italy); gray shearling over a gray cashmere hoodie…you get the picture. And no prizes for guessing why this "other side" should suddenly have become important. Ford himself now needs such clothes (brown shoes, for Pete's sake) when he's walking his toddler, Jack, in Hyde Park.

Things got even better when Ford dialed down the volume, as in a down-filled taupe blazer and a bone-toned mac (aestheticized, he claimed, with a process that removes the characteristic rubbery aroma). But the most telling addition to Ford's newly casual Fall repertoire may well have been trainers. He called them "tennis shoes." Said he'd been resisting them forever, or at least "until I could figure out how to make them distinctive." The secret? They are produced using the hand-polishing technique that is applied to Ford's dress shoes: three days per pair, to yield a lustrous aged-in-wood effect.

Such obsessive attention to detail has always been Ford's calling card. When the item merits the attention, the result can be stunning. And so it was with Fall's eveningwear. Anyone needing their color fix could find it in lustrous silk jacquard jackets, in exotic ikats, or in textures so lush they could almost have been dévoré. And there was still color elsewhere in the collection: a zing of chartreuse slipped into a pile of cashmere sweaters, a tasty selection of spice tones in amid the urban charcoal.