He Replaced the King of Sexy. Now He’s Leaving.

“At the end of the day, desire is what makes the world go around, and Tom Ford is synonymous with desire,” the designer Peter Hawkings told Vogue in 2023. Newly anointed as the creative director of the Tom Ford brand at the time — the only person to hold the position besides its founder — Mr. Hawkings was charged with bringing Ford-style sexy back, though in his own fashion.

“My vision of sexiness is going to be probably more subtle than Tom’s,” Mr. Hawkings said at the time.

Perhaps it was too subtle. Mr. Hawkings, 50, announced that he was exiting the company after less than a year on the job, a development confirmed on Monday by the Estée Lauder Companies. In 2022, the Lauder group agreed to buy Mr. Ford’s company in a deal totaling $2.8 billion, the largest deal in the industry that year. It made Mr. Ford a billionaire, and it was the payoff on a long-term strategy he pursued since the label’s inception in 2005. (He began making sunglasses under his name in 2004.) Though Mr. Ford’s apparel was crucial to the brand’s image, almost from the outset, it took a back seat to the far more lucrative profit engines of makeup and perfume.

Sexiness fueled it all. An inveterate provocateur, Mr. Ford infused hedonism and sensuality into every brand he was associated with. Think of his 1997 logo G-string for Gucci or the negligee frocks and corset dresses he designed during his brief tenure at Saint Laurent (collections that caused Yves Saint Laurent himself to lament publicly that Mr. Ford had destroyed, in one season, everything he’d worked 40 years to build). Or remember the heady fragrances he produced under the Tom Ford label, sometimes giving them names that are not printable in a family publication.

Although Mr. Hawkings had been at Mr. Ford’s at his side through much of that time — until Ford’s 2023 exit, he ran the brand’s men’s wear operation in London — his designs as creative director never quite ignited the market or excited the press.