U.S. designer Tom Ford, 45, is former creative director of Gucci Group. The Texas-born designer was a major force in fashion in the '90s.

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Vera Wang, famous for her couture bridal gowns, is coming out with a line of $69 dresses and $99 handbags at the Kohl's department-store chain. French fashion house Christian Dior is expanding its line of $3,500-and-up customizable handbags, allowing shoppers to choose their own skins, colors and hardware. And pop star Gwen Stefani, on the strength of her successful L.A.M.B. fashion collection, will launch a line of fragrances with Coty Inc. in the fall.

These are only a few of the changes in store for fashion this year as the industry enjoys a boom in luxury goods and wrestles with a glut of fashion designers.

What can shoppers make of it? With so many sometimes contradictory currents in fashion, we sought out Tom Ford, former creative director of Gucci Group who became a major force in international fashion in the 1990s, to discuss where the industry is going and how to create your own personal style.

Though best known for flourishes such as hip huggers and plunging necklines for women in the 1990s, he is also considered one of the industry's most articulate predictors of the zeitgeist. The 45-year-old Texas-born designer, who left Gucci in 2004, will dive back into fashion apparel this spring when he introduces his first signature menswear line at a new Madison Avenue boutique.

As he surveys the global luxury-goods landscape today, Ford sees several big trends since his heyday at Gucci. In a shift from the era of mass luxury, which he himself helped usher in, consumers are demanding ever more uniqueness and customization in fashion. The designer also thinks that as high fashion becomes more democratic — with designer clothes available at Target and Wal-Mart — everyone is capable of pulling off a stylish individual look.

"You should never be intimidated by fashion," he says. "It is meant to be fun."

Ford's approach to high fashion has always been a blend of innovation and accessibility — a characteristic that has caused some critics to deride him as more of a marketer than an artiste. But Ford shrugs. "I have always had very mass tastes — mass taste on a high level — and I'm proud of it," he says. Ford's mission as a designer was always "to be ahead of the curve but never too far ahead."

Here's a look at some key themes Ford sees in fashion in the future, as well as a few tips on how people can define their own personal style today:

Cheap chic will stay chic

As more mass chains — such as Target, which has deals with Isaac Mizrahi and others — produce low-priced designer clothes and accessories, high fashion is becoming more democratic than ever before.

Sitting in his London home, Ford is wearing a pair of Levis and a T-shirt. His T-shirts are always "from Gap or Banana Republic or some underwear label," he notes. "The idea is that good design should be affordable to all.

"With Target, for example, you go in there and find something that is a great price and wonderful for its intrinsic value. This is democratization of fashion. I love this high-low concept," he says, adding: "There is all this accessibility — everything is now online."

During his years at Gucci, Ford used the GG logo as a launch pad for creating cachet, updating it and putting it on everything from shoes to handbags to dog beds.

Nowadays, designers of every stripe, high and low, plaster logos on a broad array of merchandise, so that logos no longer carry the connoisseurship and cachet they once did. "I never thought logos were the way to sell products," he says. Too often they are showy labels that don't represent merchandise that is high quality. A logo is "only as valuable as the brand it represents. People now are maybe more suspicious of that hollow product behind the logo."

Celebrity marketing here to stay

"It has become so formulaic — the celebrities and the party pictures that run all over the world — and I am just tired of it," says Ford, who spends part of the year at his home in Los Angeles. "I have a lot of friends who are actors and actresses, and in some cases (all this publicity centering on fashion) hurts their careers. It demystifies them — you get so tired of seeing someone's face on an advertising billboard."

In 2006, several luxury-goods makers, including Versace, veered away from stars to showcase models in their ad campaigns. Yet, celebrities continue to dominate most fashion advertising and product endorsements. And a growing number of stars, including Stefani and Beyoncé, have been pushing their own fashion lines.

"In a way, it is understandable (that celebrity marketing thrives). They are a constant in our lives. In a way, they have become our family," Ford says.

At Gucci, Ford was the designer most responsible for ushering in the ultra-sexy style of the 1990s. There have always been sexy fashions, but that decade's look, from low-cut pants to gowns with plunging necklines, sizzled with sex appeal.

"Right now, sexiness in fashion has given way to sensuality" — a more subtle look, he notes. But "everything is cyclical," says Ford. Sexiness in fashion "is never going to go away — because we are human beings and that is one of our fundamental drives: our attraction to other people."

The reality is that while beauty standards come and go, people "want to look beautiful and want to look attractive in clothing."