Two months ago, I got a tip from a well-placed source in Milan that Peter Hawkings, the creative director of Tom Ford, was out and that Hedi Slimane, designer of Celine, was in. The Slimane detail seemed far-fetched to me—he’s too expensive, among other things—but I wasn’t surprised to hear that something was afoot at Tom Ford, which the designer and Domenico De Sole had sold to Estée Lauder for $2.8 billion in 2023. It was just a week earlier, after all, that Ford, himself, had worn an Anthony Vaccarello-for-Yves Saint Laurent velvet dinner jacket to the Met Gala—a not-so-subtle dig at Hawkings, a protégé who had designed menswear under him for nearly 25 years, dating all the way back to his days at Gucci. Ford had also handpicked Hawkings to succeed him to design his fashion collections.