If anyone wanted to make a film about the American fashion industry and needed a protagonist who embodied the business, in all of its strongest and weakest qualities, they would do well to look to the life and times of Tommy Hilfiger: a plucky, can-do kid who decided to start a fashion label despite having no training in fashion design or business.
There’s his early days in the denim market; the use of celebrities to market his label; the tireless self-publicity, turning himself into a celebrity; the ubiquity of the label leading, inevitably, to public fatigue; the humbled redirection of the brand in a more cautious 21st century. Just as Hilfiger has always prided himself on marketing distinctly American styles, so his own career is a perfect encapsulation of the US fashion business of the past quarter-century. Even the designer’s office is American to a nigh-on parodic degree: On the top floor of an unassuming building in midtown Manhattan, Hilfiger has tricked the place out to resemble the inside of a chi-chi beach house, replete with white painted floorboards, beach chairs, antique mirrors and striped awnings, where waiters in white buttoned-up shirts tote around goblets of ice water with slivers of lemon. Outside one of the windows looms the Empire State Building. The only way this room could present a tableau of more idealized Americana would be if Frank Sinatra was snapping his fingers in the corner while Martha Stewart busied herself baking an apple pie.
This romanticized style has proven highly lucrative for Hilfiger — although interestingly, about two-thirds of the company’s revenue comes from sales outside the US, suggesting it’s easier to buy into Hilfiger’s idealization of American life if you don’t actually live in the US. Last year, Phillips-Van Heusen bought the brand from London-based Apax Partners in a US$3 billion cash-and-stock deal — Apax had itself bought Hilfiger in 2006 for US$1.6 billion — and, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, the acquisition was the biggest announced by a US clothing retailer in 10 years, and the eighth biggest announced by any US company last year.
Photo: Reuters
Yet Hilfiger, who is now “global brand ambassador,” studiously presents a self-image more in keeping with the hokey, down-at-the-homestead look of his label than that of a very, very wealthy man who leads a very, very ritzy life. He arrives wearing a blue cardigan, loafers and red corduroy trousers, like a slightly wacky university researcher, as opposed to a fashion designer who has a two-floor apartment on the top of New York’s Plaza hotel, a house in Greenwich, Connecticut and another in Mustique, where his neighbor is Mick Jagger. One of his four children from his first marriage, his daughter Ally, starred in a reality TV show called Rich Girls, which probably needs no further description.
Hilfiger bears a striking resemblance to his old friend, Andy Warhol, whom he used to hang out with at Studio 54, and, like Warhol, his manner of speaking is careful and clipped to a frankly anachronistic extent. Contractions appear to be as verboten in the Hilfiger universe as ripped jeans (“do not,” almost never “don’t”). At one point, the word “foolish” is spat out with a passion that suggests it is possibly his strongest epithet.
Hilfiger’s outfit is, inevitably, an advert for his latest collection, called Prep World. It is a celebration of all things preppy, including logoed collegiate jumpers, blazers and shirt dresses. Preppy is a distinctly American look — slightly stuffy and slightly sporty, and one familiar to non-Americans from films such as Dead Poets Society (brass-buttoned blazers, shirts with posh crests) and Love Story (Ali McGraw’s cable-knit jumpers and long cashmere scarves are pure prep). Hilfiger has always loved the look because, he says, settling back into an armchair, it is “classic, traditional and easy to wear. It is the basis of all American fashion.”
photo: AFP
It is also, incidentally, a look that denotes wealth, or at least aspiration to it. Its nearest equivalent in Britain is the Sloane, but preppiness has less to do with old systems of class and more to do with new money.
Plenty of designers idealize the styles worn by the wealthy from their own country — see Vivienne Westwood’s fascination with Regency ball gowns, or Paul Smith’s distinctly Sloaney style. But American designers are particularly prone to this, maybe because, in lieu of having a centuries-old class system, America has a profound fascination with money. Along with Hilfiger, Ralph Lauren has long loved the preppy look, and many others — from up-and-coming designer Tory Burch to US high-street outlet J Crew — base their entire labels on the look. Hilfiger suggests its popularity now is a reaction to the global recession. After all, he says with a merry laugh, it’s a way of looking “not poor.”
Although Hilfiger insists that he grew up around the preppy look (“My father dressed like Mr Ivy League, all tweed suits with regimental ties, Oxford shirts and wing-tipped shoes”), he, like his idol and style soul mate, Ralph Lauren, has something of the Great Gatsby to him. Just as Lauren was born Ralph Lifshitz, and built an empire out of a monied look a million miles from his own Jewish immigrant background, Hilfiger was born and raised in Elmira, New York, in a working-class Irish Catholic neighborhood, one of nine children. His father was a jeweler and his mother a nurse, and unlike the shiny, confident youths who populate Tommy Hilfiger ads, he was not a particularly happy teenager.
“I had no confidence at school. I was not a good student and I really thought I was pretty stupid. Just dumb,” he says. “Algebra looked like Chinese characters to me, and I could never get into reading Shakespeare. I just did not get it.”
Worse, he wanted to be a football player, but there was even less chance the 47kg, 150cm-tall kid would get picked ahead of his 100kg, 180cm-tall classmates. So instead, he focused on “music and girls and cars,” and it was while going through some of his albums in his bedroom that he had an idea.
“I was looking at people like Jim Morrison and David Bowie and Mick Jagger and I thought, Ah! I want to look like them!” he says, his whole face brightening like a eureka lightbulb.
Hilfiger had never had any interest in clothes as a teenager — let alone any training — and it is telling that his impetus was self-reinvention (geeky kid becomes teenage rebel) as opposed to a deep love of couture. But there was another factor: Because Hilfiger had little hope of doing well in college (despite his father’s hopes that he would go to an Ivy League university), he’d already been thinking of going into the business straight from high school. “I thought,” he says, “if I went into business I’d be able to control my own destiny.”
So he started going into Manhattan, buying the sort of bell-bottom jeans that he saw his musical heroes wearing, and selling them to his friends at a profit. He set up a store in Elmira called The People’s Place, which sounds like an embodiment of the 1960s: “We had incense and rock ’n’ roll posters, and we sold records and rolling papers. People could just, like, hang out. We had a cool vibe going,” Hilfiger says. That worked so well that he and some other friends expanded, and had several other stores. This meant going into New York City more often, and he started hanging out at Warhol’s Factory and Studio 54. “I had a lot of fun,” he says, one suspects, euphemistically.
By the time he was 25, The People’s Place had gone bankrupt (something Hilfiger attributed later to having “too much fun”) and, with the help of a financial backer, he launched his own label, after turning down job offers at Calvin Klein and elsewhere.
“I knew exactly what I wanted to do — I wanted to build some kind of lifestyle brand that was preppy and cool,” he says. The bell-bottom jeans had long gone, and along with them his low self-esteem. In 1986, two years after Hilfiger officially launched his eponymous label, he put up a billboard in Times Square comparing himself to Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Perry Ellis, the US’ three most famous designers.
By the late 1980s, Tommy Hilfiger was a fully established brand. (His father was beginning to stop complaining that he hadn’t gone into accounting as he’d hoped, possibly mollified by the fact his son was now dressing like him.) He taught himself how to draw, how to design, how to work out the fit, the pricing — everything. But as much as all that, what helped him was that he spotted the value of having famous people wear your clothes, at a time when most other designers scorned celebrities. (The other ones to realize this were Giorgio Armani and Gianni Versace and, Hilfiger can’t resist adding, “Versace was paying them a lot of money.”) He happily reels off the names of celebrities who have worn his clothes, “many of whom are friends.” It was in the 1990s that his association with celebrities reached both its peak, and its nadir.
In 1994, Snoop Doggy Dogg wore Tommy Hilfiger on Saturday Night Live and sales allegedly rose by US$90 million in a year. The prominent display of the distinctive Hilfiger label was part of the appeal to the hip-hop stars, but what also undoubtedly contributed was Hilfiger’s enthusiastic, if not wholly altruistic, embrace of a demographic that most designers ignored, or even scorned.
Hilfiger, still a music fan and businessman at heart — as opposed to a designer — was happy for the brand to take a more hip-hop-friendly look (bright, baggy clothes, giant logos) at the expense of its original preppy style.
“I looked at the rap community like street kids wanting their own brand. But now I look at that period with the rappers in the 1990s as a trend of the moment. What it taught me was never to follow a trend, because trends move on,” he says.
He then became associated with yet another American tradition, albeit one less appealing than hip-hop or preppiness: racism. In the mid 1990s, a rumor started that Hilfiger had been on The Oprah Winfrey Show and said he wished “African-Americans, Hispanics, Jews and Asians” wouldn’t buy his clothes. Even after both Hilfiger and Winfrey issued emphatic denials that this had ever happened, the rumor persisted.
“It was stupid, ridiculous, foolish,” says Hilfiger, looking a little ruffled for the first time. “But I think, if you’re in the spotlight, people are going to say bad things, and that’s just the way it is.” But there is anger, still, in his voice.
By the beginning of the 21st century, the Hilfiger brand had lost much of its fashion luster due to overdistribution and an overfondness of branding. “There was a bit of a backlash,” Hilfiger concedes with understatement. He has since refocused the label by returning to what it always did best — cute, preppy styles with a dapper edge, the sort of clothes his father wore and idealized — and it has regained credibility.
In 2008, Hilfiger married his second wife, Dee, and the two had their first child, Sebastian, last year. So does Sebastian wear preppy clothes?
“Of course.”
And what is a preppy baby look?
“It’s the same as a preppy dad look,” he smiles.
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