Tom Ford’s beloved husband Richard Buckley passed just last week, devastatingly ending a 35-year-strong matrimony. Buckley was an esteemed fashion journalist, known to have surreptitiously married the ever-lauded Tom Ford in 2014 after their first 27 years together.

In his final piece of prose, Buckley wrote a heartfelt ode to his husband. He wrote: “I tend to go silent after one of his shows. I do not run backstage and fawn all over him, and I know that hurts his feelings. Truth be told, I am always a total nervous wreck before his presentations, to the point where I physically blank out.”

“It has always been a real problem for me that I cannot watch Tom’s shows objectively, as I would anyone else’s, or enjoy them even slightly.”

It seems with great devotion comes great risk. When you have something so special, the fear of losing it or letting it slip away can be paralyzing. For Buckley, maintaining objectivity when watching Tom Ford shows was near impossible.

Reportedly, Buckley broke down and sobbed at the kitchen bench after reading the first negative review of Ford’s Gucci creative directorship in 1995, to which his partner there-there’d him with a simple acknowledgement of bad press being “part of the process”. To feel so adamantly protective over a spouse’s self-expression and creative extension of being is testament to the kind of love that lasts.

A look at fashion’s rollercoaster past reveals a bevy of other star-studded unions, bound by desire, design and often a dash of drama. Think of Count Hubert James Marcel Taffin (as if you could ever remember the name in full) and star of the screen Audrey Hepburn, or Yves Saint Laurent and Nan Kempner. Brought together by glamour and events but bound by love, that latter meet-cute took place when Kempnher saw YSL’s debut at Dior in 1958, and the pairing were friends for 40 years thereafter. Like Buckley felt so deeply territorial and proud of Ford’s works, Kempner owned an unbeatable trove of 376 YSL couture pieces.

There’s so much of that platonic kind of fashion companionship, too, like in Anna Wintour and Grace Coddington. The reigning matriarch of Vogue and her “jewel in the crown” have been seen as inseparable friends and confidantes since Wintour’s commencement at Vogue. It’s a similar, albeit blood-related scene when looking at the Olsen twins. The duo’s matching outfittings and identical aesthetics have translated a biological bond into a sartorial one, and fashion’s onlookers have seen double ever since a New York Minute.

Perhaps the way that non-binary weddings have been profiled and platformed in the fashion world are some of the most wonderful displays of love and good style we have seen. In 2019, when the one and only Marc Jacobs and longtime partner Charly Defrancesco married in New York, a star-studded room swelled with golden-era supermodels. Naomi Campbelle, Kate Moss, the Hadid sisters and Anna Wintour herself dressed for the occasion, but all eyes were on Jacobs’s immaculately tailored tux and Defrancesco’s green velvet suit jacket. They both even donned matching diamond and onyx penguin pins. After meeting at a party in 2015, the two creatives have stuck together since.

While we could list a barrage of bygone and current partnerships in modern fashion’s neverending Noah’s Ark, one thing is certain—where there is someone in the limelight experly dressed and highly scrutinised, a biased, unconditionally-loving bystander is the only accessory worth worrying about. Where would the greats be without their greatest inspiration? We dare not to think.