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“It’s louche sporty — more than athletic sport,” Tom Ford said in describing his summer 2013 collection — although mannequins stretched suggestively across couch and floor in his showroom proved that the designer has not entirely left behind his signature playful sexiness.

But by getting out of the boudoir and into the bracing air, with sports jackets and stretch shorts tracing legs from thigh to knee, Mr. Ford refreshed his former vision of sooty-eyed sensuality.

The footwear might be shoes dripping with gilded fringe or boots with bondage straps at the calves, yet there was some thoughtful tailoring: pants with a drape at the front to give a streamlined femininity and jackets curving to create a round back. The ballooning shape was in Balenciaga territory. Mr. Ford called the inflating fabric “a parachute.”

“And as soon as she wears it, I will call it ‘the Gwyneth,”’ said the designer, who successfully dressed Ms. Paltrow in a slender and innocent white dress and cape for the Oscars in February.

The new Tom Ford look is still very much in tune with the private jet set and a woman who is global, rather than London local. There was nothing digital or forward looking. But the designer found something new to say in clean white and silver, or in flesh colors, contrasting with a darker vision. In his own inimitable words: “chastity and perversity.”

Tom Ford’s photographs of his spring/summer 2013 collection.

By Suzy Menkes

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