American fashion’s super power brands are having a moment. Last week Ralph Lauren brought the style pack to the Hamptons for a cookie-cutter white-picket fence experience to end all others, it was a fashion show as if imagined by Disney. His brother in status, Tommy Hilfiger, is also adept at gently impressing his brand as a lynch pin of the New York fashion swirl. His impact is set to be quietly but assuredly underscored in the upcoming Disney+ Vogue documentary on the cultural impact of the 90s, and how in their hyperbole, “it was the decade that changed everything.”
For Hilfiger’s part, his label was catapulted to global notice (and a famed 1997 show at the Natural History Museum in London where Kate and Naomi danced on the catwalk with the rapper Treach) when the hip hop world, riotously taking over mainstream music tastes, decided to wear his clothes. He calls it “the ‘fames’, fashion, art, music, entertainment, sports as pop culture. Everything in this business is very cyclical and every seven to ten years something happens [where they come together].”
At a preview prior to the show he explained that, “In the late 80s, hip hop started to emerge, and then in the 90s, it started to become stronger, and we were in the right place at the right time, because the musicians came to us wanting to wear the clothes. They wanted to look a certain way, they wanted to look like they were more preppy, more collegiate, sporty, big logos, a lot of colour. We embraced working with them and developing our collections to suit their needs.”
That period where all cultural touchstones collided set the wheels in motion for where we are now, where fashion is assiduously intertwined with every facet of popular entertainment. Which is perhaps someway to explain where Hilfiger was last night, unveiling his next spring summer collection on board the JFK, the decommissioned (in 2021) original (built between 1963 and 1965) Staten Island Ferry (an “iconic venue”), with his modern take on nautical informed fashion classics. Fashiontainment of course collides, the ferry was bought by SNL comedians Pete Davidson and Colin Jost, with plans to renovate the 3 level, 277 foot long vessel into an entertainment venue. Superstar collaboration continued on his front row Brooke Shields sat watching on as her daughter Grier Henchy walked in the show, alongside Damson Idris, Patrick Schwarzenegger and Jisoo from Blackpink.
As with Lauren, the art of Hilfiger’s brand and modus operandi is to reinvent the wheel of American style classics every season. The spring collection takes a nautical cue (hence the ferry) with sporty, tennis references (in a striped cropped V neck sweater, flirty pleated skirts) strewn through too, with that core red, white and blue colour palette. There’s pretty picnic check trenches and low slung capri pants (with cargo pockets placed high on the leg), oversized navy knits worn with wide red knee shorts and billowing pinstripe shirt dresses. “It's probably more of a creative challenge” says Hilfiger, “to take something that exists and reinvent it where it still is what it was, but changed and new. I like to think that we would have a collision of high and low, but put it into a blender and add some new spice to it.”
But the real crowd-thriller? He leaned right back into that brand-building hip hop moment, in a perfect homage to the ferry’s route, at the close of the show, Staten Island’s very own Wu-Tang Clan, Ghostface Killah, Method Man and Raekwon burst onto the catwalk to perform a mashup of hits to a thrilled crowd. Even Anna Wintour gave Method a fist bump.
