Finally, the long wait has ended. Tom Ford’s freshman film, A Single Man, has received its premiere.

Tom Ford

The fashion public have been salivating over the prospect of Ford trying his hand at a new medium. But, of course, it wasn’t them who got to see his debut first: the screening took place on Friday at the Venice Film Festival, safely away from the catty style set, who are largely stuck in New York as the women’s ready-to-wear shows begin. Was it a conscious decision on Ford’s part to open his film far from fashion eyes?

Probably not; you never know whether or not a film will be chosen for festival competition. At the same time, though, it was probably a good thing. The film, about a professor mourning the death of his partner, is based on a short story by Christopher Isherwood and stars Julianne Moore and Colin Firth. In other words, it’s about as far removed from the sex-and-Madonna-filled world of Ford’s Gucci as you can get, so may upset a lot of the expectations and assumptions of Ford’s former fan base. Can people used to thinking of Ford as the Great Creative Director Who Left really see him as another kind of director? Perhaps a more relevant question is: do they want to?

I am interested by the discrepancy between professions that seem proud of those who move on to other things, and those that feel betrayed by them. Lawyers and bankers, for example, are happy to try their hands at being, say, novelists, while the creative industries, by contrast, are always dissing the idea that one skill could merge into another. Louis Auchincloss and Louis Begley are lauded for their ability to write fiction and work at law firms. Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson and Keanu Reeves were snickered at when they announced that they were cutting records. Admittedly, the snickers turned out to be deserved but shouldn’t both actors have been given the benefit of the doubt before the records were released? When singer/songwriter Alanis Morissette did a good job on the television series Weeds or when artist Julian Schnabel received an Oscar nomination for directing The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, the news was greeted with the amazed dropping of jaws. And it’s even worse for models who attempt to do anything else. Shalom Harlow wants to be an actress? THAT will never work, seems to be the general mindset. Get back into your beauty box, Milla Jovovich, and forget about singing! The message is simple: be satisfied with what you’re good at guys, and stop over-reaching. But the thing is, it takes a real amount of talent and intelligence to make it to the top of any profession, and there’s no reason such talent shouldn’t be transferable.

Part of the reason it’s so difficult for the creative world to accept such jumps is envy. Mainly, though, it’s seen as hubris – you really think you are so great you will succeed at that as well as this? – and hubris is the stereotyped province of professions such as banking and law. Bankers and lawyers are supposed to have enormous egos, so even if it’s presumptuous for them to believe they can win at more than one career, it’s also expected.

. . .

Arts-related professionals, on the other hand, are supposed to be serving their muse. And no man can have two muses. If they do, the assumption is, they must be cheating on one of them and before you know it, Calliope is duking it out with Euterpe. To try and seduce them both is to treat a profession less like a “calling” and more like a job. This would imply that it involves a skill set that can be learnt, which is seen as negating originality. By contrast, originality is something that supposedly cannot be taught and is intrinsic to a personal vision. And designers must have vision. Otherwise how will they answer the fashion reporter’s perennial, cringe-worthy question: “How do you see women this season?”

Yet, when it comes to fashion at least (and you can argue whether or not the discipline qualifies as an art form as long as you want, but it’s certainly creative), it was actually Tom Ford who proved how deluded such an idea really was.

For it was Ford who stepped out of the atelier to assume a role that has become the norm in global fashion brands: “creative director”, a job that, as he increasingly defined it, had more to do with directing than creating. He was the designer-as-executive and his talents were to some extent corporate and calculated, a statement I do not mean to be derogatory. Ford did what a designer needs to do if he/she wants their work to be widely seen. Which is, after all, the point – in film as in fashion. So maybe his attempt to work in both worlds will help change the greater prejudices about those trying a different creative challenge.

My muses, all nine of them, tell me they hope so. But they’re not convinced.

vanessa.friedman @ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/friedman