Style & Fashion

The ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ star joined celeb fashion-watchers including Cardi B, Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson, Gina Gershon, Russell Westbrook, and Hailee Steinfeld at Ford’s NYFW show.

Outside the Park Avenue Armory, in the stifling New York heat as fashionistas sweated awaiting entry for Tom Ford’s New York Fashion Week show, one posh-sounding British guy was regaling two male friends with tips on how to give excellent oral sex to female partners.

“She comes first,” he insisted loudly. If it was TMI, everyone was too hot to care. “It’s true,” he continued. “That’s the name of the actual book.” Indeed it is. And there was more. If only Dr. Ruth had been there.

Inside the show, once notables including Cardi B, Anna Wintour, and Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson had found their seats (and a smashed champagne glass caused momentary panic and hurried apologies), the show began.

“I wanted to make men and women feel more beautiful and to empower them with a feeling of confidence,” Ford said in his show notes. “I feel that fashion has somehow lost its way a bit. I did not want to make clothes that were ironic or clever, but simply clothes that were beautiful.”

To that end, relative simplicity and mutedness was a constant: This was not a show of drama. The best suits of the night were worn off the runway, by Crazy Rich Asians star Henry Golding, and by the handsome Ford himself, who appeared at the end, lightly bowing to the assembled behind sunglasses.

In the show, male and female models came out in blacks and shades of mauve and light peaches in tasteful trench coats, suits, and tight, simple dresses both long and short. There were velvet cummerbunds, and nearly every female model appeared to be wearing a headscarf. The men had scruffy mop-tops of hair, and looked like sexy Mods.

Also sighted: a lot of leather, soft and also structured, sometimes an armor-ish interruption to a flowing dress, and sometimes a headscarf.

Dramatic looks occasionally materialized: a gorgeous, mass-of-fringes black jacket, flashes of animal print (also sighted at Greta Constantine), rustling, fringed dresses, and a long white dress that got the press photographers’ cameras, relatively silent throughout the show, suddenly clacking furiously.

Then it was back out into the heat, and thankfully no more sex tips.