When did Tommy Hilfiger become cool again? Once a preppy kingpin and then a megabrand designer of urban streetwear, with more than US$1.9 billion in sales of baggy jeans and colorful logo jerseys in the US at his peak, Hilfiger, in the 1990s, was very cool. But then, about 10 years ago, he just wasn’t. People became more interested in his divorce and his dating life and his daughter’s reality television show than his clothes, all of which looked increasingly like the result of a designer who was trying too hard.
The situation had become so bad for Hilfiger that just a few years ago the company seriously considered selling his clothes at Wal-Mart. Magazines had stopped paying much attention to him. As had his customers — sales in department stores had dropped by as much as 75 percent.
So the US$3 billion sale of Tommy Hilfiger to the clothing conglomerate Phillips-Van Heusen that concluded May 6 was significant for any number of reasons, not the least of which is that it suggests that the fashion elite may have underestimated Hilfiger.
The price was nearly seven times what Phillips-Van Heusen paid for Calvin Klein in 2003 and nearly five times what LVMH paid for Donna Karan in 2001, which has to give some satisfaction to a designer whose clothes once prompted the fashion critic of this newspaper to declare, “You wanted to get the SUV out and run them over a few times.”
How did Hilfiger and his partners turn this around so dramatically? Step one: Admit they had a problem in the first place.
“We were oversupplying the demand,” Hilfiger said during an interview in his double-height office on the western shores of Chelsea, the walls covered with portraits of musicians and pop stars and a framed pair of blue jeans that once belonged to Marilyn Monroe. (Her cowboy boots are there, too.)
“The large logos and the big red, white and blue theme became ubiquitous,” he said. “It got to the point where the urban kids didn’t want to wear it and the preppy kids didn’t want to wear it.”
Hilfiger was smiling in his signature style, entirely sincere if not a little overeager, as he said this — “that big toothy grin,” as Jim Moore, the creative director of GQ, describes it — almost as if he was performing an act of contrition.
“I think I was living in denial,” he said.
Since he started his business in 1985, when he was 34, with Mohan Murjani, the Indian textiles magnate behind Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, Hilfiger has had the good fortune to team up with financial partners who enabled him to create the kind of world where living in denial can be an asset.
Few other designers would have thought another preppy brand could compete in a market long ago cornered by Ralph Lauren, but Hilfiger’s idea of a youthful twist on American classics — brightly colored oxfords and buttonholes stitched in green — was an immediate success.
That was helped by an audacious marketing campaign, which included a billboard in Times Square announcing his arrival as the next great men’s designer alongside those recognizable by their initials: CK, RL and PE (for Calvin Klein, Lauren and Perry Ellis). “The fashion press went absolutely crazy,” Hilfiger said. “They did everything in their power to bury me.”
His company went public in 1992, just as the designer became one of the first to embrace the burgeoning streetwear market. In a strategy coordinated by Hilfiger’s former top executives, Lawrence Stroll and Silas Chou (now investors in Michael Kors), the company added accessories, fragrances, a home collection and jeans, as well as franchises in Europe and Asia.
With that growth came expectations from Wall Street that Hilfiger could keep expanding. But as Tommy Hilfiger became more widely available, the label became less desirable. By the end of the 1990s, the company’s stock price had plummeted to US$7.50, half its original value. Fortune magazine summed up the problems succinctly: “Now trendier brands (think Fubu) dominate urban fashion, while Tommy’s clothes fill bargain bins at Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s.”
The strangest thing about Hilfiger’s trouble was that his business overseas was just heating up, and new sales in Europe were making up for the loss of business in the US. But that would ultimately mean a second chance for the brand.
Again, it was one of Hilfiger’s business partners who had sensed an opportunity. After seeing the collection’s rise in the US, Fred Gehring, a former executive for Ralph Lauren and Pepe Jeans, had started a new company in 1997 as the Hilfiger licensee for Europe.
In 2005, Gehring, concerned that the designer’s problems in America would eventually cross over to Europe, came to its board with a proposal to take the company private. Apax Partners, a private equity firm, acquired the company for US$1.6 billion. Gehring became its chief executive and set out to turn around the business by ending some licensees, returning the focus to preppy classics and breaking the promotional cycle.
In 2007, he made a deal with Macy’s to carry the line exclusively in exchange for more desirable placement in its stores and help with marketing — which is why Hilfiger appears in Macy’s television commercials dining with Martha Stewart and dodging a dinner roll thrown by Jessica Simpson.
In September, the company opened a new flagship on Fifth Avenue, a 2,000m2 store that carries Hilfiger’s runway styles as well as the denim and sportswear collections designed in Europe, for which he serves as inspiration. And the business is now highly profitable, earning about US$300 million annually, largely thanks to the European operation. This was what inspired Phillips-Van Heusen, which hopes to expand its other brands internationally, to make the acquisition, said Emanuel Chirico, its chief executive. Clearly Hilfiger was doing something right.
“It was difficult for me because I was searching for the answer for so long, and the answer was right in front of me,” Hilfiger said. “Do what I do best.”
In 1990, Amy Chen (陳怡美) was beginning third grade in Calhoun County, Texas, as the youngest of six and the only one in her family of Taiwanese immigrants to be born in the US. She recalls, “my father gave me a stack of typed manuscript pages and a pen and asked me to find typos, missing punctuation, and extra spaces.” The manuscript was for an English-learning book to be sold in Taiwan. “I was copy editing as a child,” she says. Now a 42-year-old freelance writer in Santa Barbara, California, Amy Chen has only recently realized that her father, Chen Po-jung (陳伯榕), who
When nature calls, Masana Izawa has followed the same routine for more than 50 years: heading out to the woods in Japan, dropping his pants and doing as bears do. “We survive by eating other living things. But you can give faeces back to nature so that organisms in the soil can decompose them,” the 74-year-old said. “This means you are giving life back. What could be a more sublime act?” “Fundo-shi” (“poop-soil master”) Izawa is something of a celebrity in Japan, publishing books, delivering lectures and appearing in a documentary. People flock to his “Poopland” and centuries-old wooden “Fundo-an” (“poop-soil house”) in
For anyone on board the train looking out the window, it must have been a strange sight. The same foreigner stood outside waving at them four different times within ten minutes, three times on the left and once on the right, his face getting redder and sweatier each time. At this unique location, it’s actually possible to beat the train up the mountain on foot, though only with extreme effort. For the average hiker, the Dulishan Trail is still a great place to get some exercise and see the train — at least once — as it makes its way
Jan 13 to Jan 19 Yang Jen-huang (楊仁煌) recalls being slapped by his father when he asked about their Sakizaya heritage, telling him to never mention it otherwise they’ll be killed. “Only then did I start learning about the Karewan Incident,” he tells Mayaw Kilang in “The social culture and ethnic identification of the Sakizaya” (撒奇萊雅族的社會文化與民族認定). “Many of our elders are reluctant to call themselves Sakizaya, and are accustomed to living in Amis (Pangcah) society. Therefore, it’s up to the younger generation to push for official recognition, because there’s still a taboo with the older people.” Although the Sakizaya became Taiwan’s 13th
RSS