Remembering Richard Buckley
The New York Times
Mr. Buckley was a well known fashion journalist who, despite being married to Tom Ford, largely avoided being the story.
There’s a photograph in Tom Ford’s house in Beverly Hills, a Polaroid of him with his husband, Richard Buckley, who died last weekend at 72 after more than 30 years of health issues resulting from cancer.
The picture was taken on Shelter Island in New York in 1987 by their friend John Duka, a fashion journalist who worked at The New York Times before going on to help found KCD, the fashion industry’s most powerful public relations firm.
Perhaps because history is made to be erased (or at least airbrushed), it is sometimes forgotten that fashion wasn’t such a utopia for openly gay men back then. Numerous gay designers (including Bill Blass) refused to discuss their sexuality. Other major industry figures married women, including Mr. Duka, whose wife at the time was his KCD co-founder Kezia Keeble. By 1990, he was dead from AIDS.
