September 12th marked Tom Ford’s return to womenswear, following a six-year “pause,” with one of the most strongly guarded presentations in modern fashion memory. He turned the traditional fashion show formula on its head by banishing the standard hordes of photographers, Twitterers and bloggers who offer same-day coverage on the internet, and invited only pinnacle fashion editors and one photographer, Terry Richardson, inside the walls of his spring 2011 presentation.

Mr. Ford (as he now prefers to be called) also did away with traditional runway models, as an alternative handpicking some names you might be more recognizable with–Beyoncé, Julianne Moore, Lauren Hutton, and Rita Wilson–to showcase his garments. He told the media that they’d just have to remain for the photos: Richardson’s photographs would emerge on the newly relaunched TomFord.com in December, when the clothes were prepared for his stores. Currently Vogue is running the first images of the collection in their December issue, which hits newsstands in New York and Los Angeles this Tuesday.

“I do not recognize everyone’s requiring to see everything online the day after a show,” he explains to Vogue. “I don’t think it at last serves the customer, which is the whole point of my business–not to provide journalists or the fashion system. To put amazing out that’s going to be in a store in six months, and to observe it on a starlet, ranked in US magazine next week? My customer doesn’t desire to wear the similar thing she saw on a starlet!”

In the time as Mr. Ford left Gucci in 2004–a dark period where “My values were in the incorrect position and “I didn’t know if I cared if I lived or died”–he discovered Daoism and co-wrote, financed, directed and edited the seriously acclaimed “A Single Man,” a film which earned Colin Firth an Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a Leading Role.