Tom Ford Opening Up About Losing Friends To The AIDS Epidemic Is Moving

The legendary designer got serious at an awards do

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by Stevie Martin |
Published on

At the amfAR Inspiration Gala this week Miley Cyrus got so wasted she spent half a million dollars in one night. But there were also some serious moments, such as Tom Ford speaking about the AIDs epidemic of the 80s he believes people these days have forgotten as he took home the Award of Inspiration. It sounded like a pretty dark time that the legendary designer can't forget.

'I remember the fear of the early 1980s,' he said at the Gala. 'I remember the feeling of having dinner with a friend and running into someone I hadn't seen and the light would rack across their face and my heart just sank — you knew. They looked fine but there was something. There was something in their eyes. There was something about the look on their faces that told you that the next time you saw them they wouldn't look as well.'

He continued, referring to when his husband Richard Buckley and he started dating: 'We would meet for dinner and then we would each go to a different hospital to visit our best friends who were dying of AIDS.'

In 1988, he remembers they both got tested for HIV at the same time Buckley was diagnosed with cancer. 'I remember Richard calling me in tears with his results to tell me joyfully that he only had stage four cancer and not HIV,' Tom said. 'Who could have imagined that only having stage four cancer was something to celebrate?'

Tom also believes that the fact that our generation haven't seen so many of our friends die of the disease makes us less careful. Which is a worry. 'Today's generation of young adults have never known the ravages of AIDS as some of us have and for that reason, in some cases, they have let down their guard. We cannot let down our guard.'

Sobering words. But ones we're buying into a lot more than those nipple pasties he put on the catwalk recently.

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Follow Stevie on Twitter: @5tevieM

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.

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