Provocateur and former head of Gucci Tom Ford has been hard at work in recent months on his first foray into film, A Single Man, which stars Julianne Moore and Colin Firth. But the fashion designer (who still sits at the helm of a namesake monolith that includes menswear, eyewear, and fragrance) isn't done with the fashion industry just yet. Feverish Ford fans are counting down the days until the designer will announce the addition of women's wear into his repertoire. In the meantime, London's Times caught up with the icon ("a man who could sell merkins to a nunnery") at the launch of his latest creation: a perfume called Bois Maroccain. "I had a mid-life crisis for about seven years," Ford says of the period proceeding his departure from Gucci. As for his first footsteps back into the fashion industry post-crisis: “Of course I knew that there were people laughing and saying ha-ha look, he’s doing eyewear now and he used to be the big ‘I am’, but I knew where I was going and it didn’t bother me.”

Ford goes on to reveal that, while some things have changed, certain Fordisms will always stay the same. "I won't be doing shows. Ever. Again," he told the Times. "I don't want my designs to be shaped by journalists any more. As for the business model I followed with Gucci -- the new this, the 'It' that, the let's get it on a celebrity and shoot her in front of a logo, it was getting old then. Now it's really old." As for Ford's reputation for spawning sexually charged ads and himself posing nude for editorial purposes: "I hate talking about sex." Yet, "thing is, people look much better naked. They’re all the same colour and they can’t screw up. You see someone at the gym and they look great. Then they put on their clothes."