TAKE A SPIN INSIDE TOMMY HILFIGER’S FASHION CUISINART

Examine the closet of a young American male today and you will find baggy trousers, huge athletic jerseys of nonexistent teams, preppy polos on leave from an imaginary campus, puffy parkas ready for an expedition to suburbia’s outback. This strange look is a curious marriage of opposites, blending rebellious sloppiness with patrician cool. While it rudely renounces proper fit, it represents a truce in the war between hip and square, so deftly does it substitute ersatz sportiness for elegance. The style is called prep urban, and Tommy Hilfiger, the man whose name is livin’ large on rugby shirts, underwear and baseball caps, is among its most visible and successful suppliers.

On a humid July afternoon in New York, Hilfiger’s fingers ruffle a model’s mucky, moussed pompadour. Sascha could be the best-looking boy at the frat party no one’s daughter should have gone to. He towers over the 5-foot-8, 45-year-old designer.

“His hair’s too high,” Hilfiger says to any grooming aide within earshot. “It should be more natural. Preppier.”

In less than two hours, at 6 p.m., an audience of 1,200 store representatives and fashion reporters will witness the Tommy Hilfiger Spring 1997 collection, presented on a runway bordered by fake whitewashed bricks. Behind the tent where the fashion show will be held, a canvas tunnel houses backstage operations. As in a clockwork game of telephone, the message travels down the steamy corridor, crowded with racks of clothing, ironing boards, piles of shoes, models, girlfriends of models, dressers, makeup artists, video camera crews, hairdressers, publicists, photographers and waiters offering plastic flutes of champagne: “Tommy wants all the guys to look like they just ran their fingers through their hair.”

The show will feature more than 100 outfits worn by 33 models, including media darlings Jason Lewis, Alex Lundqvist and Brad Pitt double Mark Vanderloo. Hiring such a large corps of models is an extravagance, but Hilfiger doesn’t want to risk the problems a shortage of ready bodies can create during a fast-paced show. Besides, with $478 million in sales last year, Hilfiger is one of the hottest names in the fashion industry and a hot stock on Wall Street. He doesn’t have to scrimp.

With an “Entertainment Tonight” camera in his face and a microphone at his chin, Hilfiger says, “My inspiration came from the ‘70s. I’ve always been inspired by music and musicians.”

An assistant carrying a garment bag nearly trips over a model who has staked out some floor space by folding his lanky limbs into the lotus position, the better to endure the hurry-up-and-wait rhythm common to the Army, the entertainment industry and the fashion business.

“I have your outfit,” the courier says, executing a hockey stop next to Hilfiger. “Where do you want me to put it?”

At the end of the show, Hilfiger will take the traditional designer’s walk down the runway, acknowledging applause with a big smile and a restrained, royal wave.

“I think I’ll just wear this,” he says of the still-fresh French blue shirt, white undershirt and slim black pants he’s worn since 6 a.m., more concerned with the models’ hair than his own appearance.

A BBC camera crew elbows in next to the designer. “The show is full of color and the clothes are more streamlined,” he tells them. “There’s a Palm Beach group and some James Bond clothes, some Mod, some surfer looks. I put everything into the blender and redesign the classics.”

A model sent to the boss for hair approval spills champagne on him. Hilfiger flicks the bubbly puddle off his thigh without so much as a scowl. He didn’t get here by being laid back, but all outward evidence indicates his body temperature hovers in the low 90s.

“I love sports, music, but I’m very classic. I’ve taken a little Mod, a little rock ‘n’ roll, a little athletic inspiration. We think people have seen the conservative looks, so we’re giving them something different today.”

Fox Style News wraps up its interview and edges through the crowd to the buffet table.

Jason Lewis, he of the cleft chin and chiseled cheekbones, introduces Hilfiger to the camera as a tape destined for the cable show “Fashion File” turns. “The word on the street is Tommy’s a nice guy,” Lewis says.

A production assistant pauses next to a rack of sherbet-colored silk sport coats and seersucker pants. “One hour to first outfit,” he bellows.

“It’s much slimmer, closer to the body,” Hilfiger is telling a reporter from “Extra.”

Before he and show producer Kevin Krier go into the tent for a music check, Hilfiger paces the length of the backstage area, surveying the models’ dos. A new belt is offered, featuring a simple silver TH buckle. He puts it on, explaining that the monogram will be used on loafers to be included in the new Tommy Hilfiger shoe collection. In addition to the company’s divisions for menswear, boys’ clothing and athletic gear, there are 13 licensees that produce men’s tailored clothing, shoes, underwear, jeans, fragrances, robes and sleepwear, dress shirts, golf wear, socks, ties, belts, wallets and eyeglasses. A new Tommy women’s sportswear line arrived in 400 U.S. department stores this month. The TH belt, a cousin to the venerable, and much more expensive, Hermes “H” design, is not gender specific and will probably be part of the inevitable women’s accessories line.

“This season, it’s all about color--the intensification of color,” he says. Hilfiger’s voice is soft and a bit breathy. There is no change in his demeanor when the camera’s rolling. He seriously considers the questions the field producer from Black Entertainment Television poses, then breaks the mood by flashing a toothy grin that says, “It’s just clothes.”

The evening’s activities--including celebrity arrivals (“Here’s New York Knicks player Herb Williams”), the fashion show and backstage interviews with models and the designer--are being beamed via satellite to 13 Tommy Hilfiger supershops within department stores throughout the country. When Hilfiger makes personal appearances at stores, fans wait hours to shake his hand, to have him autograph a picture of his boyish, all-American face.

Donna Karan has the gift to make women she’s never met before feel as if they are talking to a trusted friend; Hilfiger shares that quality. The faithful would be happy if he were on the road constantly. But he has a growing empire to supervise, a wife and four children he already fears he’s neglecting, homes in Connecticut, Nantucket and the Caribbean island of Mustique. Since he can’t be everywhere, Tommy TV, as the satellite hookup is called, brings him as close to his public as possible.

In the tent, Hilfiger has his Rocky moment. It’s the night before the big fight (race, debate, music contest, ice skating competition--pick one) and the contender surveys the empty hall, knowing that the vacant chairs will soon be occupied by his judges, and the effectiveness of the daily cocktail of nerve, adrenaline, sweat and drive that nourished him to this point will be determined. But the chairs in this tent aren’t vacant. On each one sits a small shopping bag printed with the Tommy Hilfiger logo. Each bag contains a shiny, logo-enhanced folder full of press materials and a sample of Tommy, Hilfiger’s best-selling men’s cologne, wrapped in tissue paper printed with the red, white and blue company emblem.

The Tommy Hilfiger rectangle, red to the east, white to the west, bordered with navy at the north and south, is everywhere in the room, enlarged as a backdrop for the runway, miniaturized on the thousand pieces of tissue paper. The subliminal effect of so many visual symbols, so many white letters spelling Tommy Hilfiger at the top and bottom of the ubiquitous rectangle, is inescapable. Tommy Hilfiger. Tommy Hilfiger. Tommy Hilfiger. Tommy Hilfiger. It’s a Tommy world.

*

No one ever went broke waving the flag. The image Tommy Hilfiger has presented in his advertising is all-American enough to be borrowed by a presidential candidate. Double-page magazine spreads display denim-clad young men in front of Old Glory, which is artfully draped over the chicken-wire fence of a farm somewhere in the heartland of our collective imagination.

A 20-page advertising insert in September Vogue’s fall fashion issue that introduces the Tommy women’s line is persistently red, white and blue: If two fresh-faced cheerleaders wear white shirts in one tableau, they’re shown lounging on a red blanket, and the tricolor banner nestles in the lower right-hand corner. The pictures, part of a 10-month, $25-million campaign to launch Tommy and the Tommy girl fragrance, were shot by top fashion photographer Arthur Elgort in the Adirondacks, a region rich with spacious skies and purple mountains’ majesty.

Hilfiger previewed Tommy for a group of fashion editors at the company’s showrooms in June. They could see the tartan kilts and polar fleece pullovers for themselves; the classic, nicely detailed separates didn’t beg for an explanation the way some designer’s arcane runway fantasies do. So in describing the clothes, Hilfiger used a vocabulary that was unspecific, a language more of ethos than silhouette: “Tommy girl is sexy, young, light-hearted, self-assured, crisp, natural.”

The promise of image-oriented advertising is always one of transformation and inclusion. Buy the product and you will become as healthy, attractive, athletic and carefree as the kids frolicking in the ads. Wear the blue striped shirt and khaki pants and you’ll be invited to the hayride.

The Hilfiger company image wasn’t only built on scenes of golden youths at play. The America the Beautiful ads established the brand as a readily identifiable (via its logos) uniform of the ruling class. Make no mistake--by the straightness of their teeth, the squareness of their jaws and the thickness of their hair, these kids are well-bred. (Contrast that with the current Guess jeans model, a sullen icon who looks like she took up streetwalking just past puberty.) Presenting the Hilfiger brand as something the privileged caste would choose was the first step in a dance no one could have predicted. Because in the sociology of clothes, Tommy Hilfiger has become a cross-cultural phenomenon.

Urban prep was not a street style engineered by a clever marketer. It sprang from the natural desire of the have-nots to gain the trappings of success. To discuss it, one must be conversant with the Hilfiger lexicon: “urban” is a respectful euphemism for black or Puerto Rican, “suburban” is code word for white, “diverse” describes different races in concert, a “golfer” is an adult white guy.

“I’m not the only one who has benefited from the choices the urban kids have made,” Hilfiger says. “The urban kids started wearing designer clothes, status clothes. They wore Polo by Ralph Lauren, Nautica, Timberland, Nike, Fila and Tommy Hilfiger. Older urban kids want to drive BMWs and Mercedeses. They want the most expensive footwear. They want Rolexes and Cartier watches.”

But they did not, like Jay Gatsby, slavishly mimic the way traditional styles had been worn. Instead, they proceeded to mock them, wearing shirts five sizes too big, trousers so oversized that the pants slipped down to the tops of their thighs, exposing more labels on their skivvies. These kids were simultaneously having their status symbols and rendering them ridiculous.

Rap and hip hop artists picked up on the style, and athletic wear and urban prep became the preferred wardrobe in their videos. Once Coolio and Snoop Doggy Dog gave the look their blessing, kids who spent more time in malls than on any city’s mean streets adopted the fashion.

According to another theory, the droopy-drawers look originated in our nation’s prisons, where inmates normally lose weight and belts are prohibited. It’s doubtful many suburbanites were consciously sporting felony chic, but therein lies one of the miracles of Hilfiger’s success. He was able to keep, and expand, both segments of the market. Outlaw singers didn’t think him too safe for dressing the bourgeoisie. Preppy kids, whose forebears had fled city tenements, elected to look as tough as the baddest downtown rapper. No matter how many finger-wagging programs about the strength and depth of American racism “Nightline” might produce, the fact is millions of clean and sober white boys chose to emulate kids their parents might not welcome in for dinner.

Hilfiger didn’t merely tolerate his urban customers, he embraced them. If they liked logos, the signage would grow bigger, brighter and more plentiful. Andy Hilfiger, Tommy’s younger brother and director of publicity for Tommy Jeans, took a special interest in cultivating musicians. “They’d call up and say, ‘We’re wearing your clothes. We need stuff for a tour or a video.’ I’d take care of them,” Andy says. “When they called other designers on Tommy’s level, they’d be ignored.”

Rappers like Grand Puba and Chef Raekwon showed their gratitude by celebrating Hilfiger in song, even giving him an abbreviated street name--Tommy Hil. “And others couldn’t figure, How me and Hilfiger used to move through with vigor,” Q-Tip chanted on a Mobb Deep record. Whenever Hilfiger was asked how he felt about being the hero of hip hop’s elite, he’d reply, “I’m complimented. I know they can wear anything. They can wear Armani, they can wear Versace. They choose my clothes. It’s a true, true honor. I think these kids are so cool.”

Kidada Jones, daughter of music industry heavyweight and Vibe magazine owner Quincy Jones, works for Hilfiger. She outfits groups like TLC, whose members wore Hilfiger nylon jeans in a recent photo shoot, and appears in Tommy Jeans ads that feature offspring of the famous, a campaign Andy Hilfiger describes as “diverse.” Pointing at a photograph of a jumble of young bodies, he says, “That’s Kidada, Balthazar Getty, Jackson Browne’s son, Rod Stewart’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, Errol Flynn’s grandson, the lead singer of the R & B group Jodeci.”

Those multicultural slackers, hipper and less corn-fed than the groups gamboling across the pages of Vogue or the spiffily dressed junior execs who star in ads targeted for Forbes or GQ, will be seen in Vibe, Wired, Details and Rolling Stone. Bus shelters in a number of cities are papered with an unstudly, shirtless guy in Tommy jeans, the FIGER on his underwear waistband peeping out above his slender hip. The irresistible kindergarten-recess portrait used for Tommy Hilfiger boys ads features diverse children dressed in rolled-up khakis and polos bearing the Hilfiger lion crest. They look like they could teach world leaders how to play in the sandbox harmoniously.

Image maintenance is just one crucial element of the strategy that helped make Tommy Hilfiger U.S.A. the No. 1 apparel firm traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Barbara Bates, president of the company, worked at Polo for 10 years before joining Hilfiger in 1991. “Obviously, the product had to be great,” she says. “But the presentation, the visual merchandising, having our own shops within the department stores, having our own selling specialists, was all important. That was a formula that had worked very well at Polo. Creating the hype behind it was a formula that had worked very successfully also, so we very aggressively went after that, first in men’s, then in boys, we’re doing it in denim right now, and we’re launching women’s wear the same way.”

Ralph Lauren, who has just inaugurated two younger, lower-priced lines to combat Hilfiger’s encroachment, was an unwitting tutor. “Ralph and I have very similar taste,” Hilfiger says. “We both love the classics. I think Ralph has done an incredible job, and if anybody has been an influence in America, he has.”

In the 14-person Hilfiger design studio, the major collections and mini-groups that roll out every month are developed. Each is designed around a theme, a location or an activity in which form follows function. The themes impart a look and a palette and conjure visions of a fantasy lifestyle: Expedition, Alpine, Nautical, Tailgate, Bermuda, Back Bay. Lauren began working with themes in the ‘70s: Sun Valley, Santa Fe, Safari. A genealogical chart of traditional American style would trace a line from Brooks Brothers to Lauren to Hilfiger.

“I take the classic idea and mix it with a lot of different inspirations,” Hilfiger says. “I made my shirts oversized and I made them relaxed. I washed the cotton shirts till they were soft. I made my chinos baggy and loose. Now I’m looking at board sports and getting inspiration from what the snowboarders and surfers wear.”

*

“Five minutes to first outfit. Nobody should be eating or drinking anymore.”

Backstage, Hilfiger conducts another hair check, and the telephone game resumes: “Tommy says Jeff’s hair is perfect. Everyone look at Jeff.”

A photographer who has been shadowing Hilfiger for the past two hours observes him thank some of the backstage crew. “You guys really did a great job,” Hilfiger says, remembering each of his employees by name.

“There isn’t even a touch of irony here, is there?” the photographer says to a visitor. “I mean, he’s such a nice guy, the models love him, his staff loves him, the clothes are great, he’s making a fortune. It’s just a little too good to be true.”

Krier, who looks far too nervous considering the number of high-profile shows he’s directed, assembles the models and launches into the fashion version of the pregame pep talk. “Remember, you look terrific. Remember, your dresser is your friend. I want it to rock out there. You’re out there, you’re a happy guy, you’re a rock star.”

Hilfiger casts a wary eye at a model’s Beatleoid hair. “Every season he says he wants the hair more preppy,” one of Krier’s lieutenants whispers to a hairdresser, rolling his eyes. “Every season.”

From the yellow suede surfer pants to the lean 007 suits to the patch-printed bike jerseys that retailers in the audience know fly out of the stores, the show is an explosion of color and energy that is nearly exhausting to watch. “He’s cleverly using the runway to build his hip, rock ‘n’ roll image,” a trade paper writes. “Mr. Hilfiger had fresh and funny ideas,” the New York Times raves.

Although Hilfiger received two major awards last year--the Council of Fashion Designers of America Menswear Designer of the Year and VH-1’s Catwalk to Sidewalk honor--and swept five categories in the fragrance industry’s Fifi Awards this year, he has much at stake. “There’s more pressure than before, because we’re being looked at under a microscope by everyone,” Hilfiger says. “They’re wondering what the big deal is.”

The designs just showcased are from a higher-priced collection that will be distributed to only a few stores. The buyers from Robinsons-May, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s know Hilfiger’s sporty and traditional clothes sell. With this show, Hilfiger is trying to declare himself a trendsetter of a different sort, a designer who can tailor a hip suit, too. Style arbiters from Barneys and Saks, who don’t buy from Hilfiger, were also in the audience.

Once designers gain a following with high fashion, they often capitalize on their name by creating less-expensive collections that sell in greater volume. Hilfiger is working backward. Now that his moneymaking sportswear is as close to a sure thing as the garment industry experiences, he wants to trade up. He plans to do the same thing in women’s wear--follow the casual Tommy line with a women’s collection not meant for the masses.

Backstage, there is no champagne left for the boss, who is ready to unwind after the show. Someone locates a vodka cranberry, which Hilfiger graciously accepts as he undertakes still another interview. The photographer, watching the indefatigable designer and still searching for a sinister subtext for the evening, asks a rhetorical question he hopes is pregnant with meaning: “So if he’s a grown man, why is he called Tommy?”

*

He was always Tommy, the second of nine children in a Catholic family raised in a five-bedroom house in Elmira, a dreary little city in upstate New York. His father was a jeweler and watchmaker and snappy dresser, his mother a registered nurse.

“All we had was each other,” Andy says. “A lot of people in that area would go on vacation. We didn’t. When we were in high school, we didn’t think about which college we were going to because who was going to pay for it?” Hilfiger craved the success that didn’t require a degree. If he hadn’t become a designer, he says, he would have been a rock star or an actor.

With money he earned working in a boutique the summer before his senior year in high school, he and two friends opened his first store in Elmira when he was 18. He’d drive the 240 miles to Manhattan in his Volkswagen, buy bell bottoms wholesale and resell them, along with candles, posters and the black lights then standard in hippy-dippy head shops. The store was called People’s Place, and in three years had sister shops in five neighboring towns. When Tommy was 20 and given to snakeskin high-heeled boots and velvet bell bottoms, he pulled up to his parents’ house in a new Mercedes.

The People’s Place stores were near the campuses of Syracuse, Cornell and the state university at Binghamton. Hilfiger knew what his customers wanted, and when he couldn’t find styles with the right rock ‘n’ roll spirit, he sketched his own designs and found subcontractors in New York to make them. The business grew fast, too fast. Hilfiger and his partners were forced to file for bankruptcy in the late ‘70s. The wolf that lurks at the entrepreneur’s door came in, pulled up a chair and stayed for breakfast. When Hilfiger is asked what drives him today, he says, “Fear. Fear of losing. It was devastating.”

With the pretty girl he married in 1980, he moved to New York, and without any formal training, hired on as a free-lance designer at a number of sportswear firms. Sometimes, he and his wife, Susie, a Fashion Institute of Technology graduate, took jobs as a design team. By the mid-’80s, he’d joined forces with clothing mogul Mohan Murjani, who had ridden designer jeans’ first wave to riches. Murjani was looking for the next Calvin Klein, and in a cheeky campaign created by advertising iconoclast George Lois, Hilfiger was trumpeted as fashion’s new messiah. “First there was Geoffrey Beene, Bill Blass and Stanley Blacker. Then, Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren. Today, it’s Tommy Hilfiger,” the ads proclaimed.

Such brash self-promotion wasn’t well received in the design community, which looked on Hilfiger as the fashion equivalent of Betty Crocker. But the clothes were popular enough to inspire brisk business at five Tommy Hilfiger stores, including one on Rodeo Drive, and he got a chance to start tweaking sailing jackets, button-down shirts and chinos in a way that became his own. Hilfiger’s association with Murjani ended in 1989. He started the current company soon after with three partners, and it went public in 1992.

Twice a month, Hilfiger appears on “Good Morning America” as a style consultant. In brief, informative segments, he provides solutions to common clothing conundrums, such as how a man accustomed to wearing suits and ties can adopt a style suitable for corporate casual days. Hilfiger sees the gig as a warmup for his own TV show. Once that’s a reality, he plans to produce books and videos. As Tommy Hilfiger contemplates his role as a multimedia style guru, the comparisons to Martha Stewart are obvious.

Stewart is a neighbor in Connecticut, where Hilfiger lives on a historic farm in a 22-room mansion. “He’s real and he’s such a family-oriented person and that makes him accessible,” says the woman who knows something about projecting accessibility. “He’s smart enough, and everything he’s tried so far has worked, but it isn’t easy to transfer ideas to print and TV and get them across to people. It’s all about being a teacher. He’s a charming guy and he’s nice, and that helps a lot these days.”

Tommy Hilfiger infants and toddlers will be in stores in a year. The following year, home furnishings should be ready. “It’s exciting to me that my ideas could end up in the bedroom, the kitchen or the bathroom,” he says.

A 20,000-square-foot store offering all things Tommy is under construction on the Beverly Hills corner that Carroll & Co. occupied for the past 43 years. It is scheduled to open in November 1997. Tourists familiar with his Tokyo shop should feel right at home on Rodeo Drive; stores in London, Paris and New York are planned. Hilfiger recently paid $25 million for the New York building in which his company occupies seven floors. A gym will be built there and an amphitheater for fashion shows.

A sense of manifest destiny pervades the company psyche. With only 5% of national sales generated in California, president Bates describes the state as “under-penetrated.” A campaign to boost recognition of the Hilfiger name on the West Coast began 18 months ago. By the time the flagship store opens on Rodeo, and Bloomingdale’s, a big Hilfiger distributor, comes to California, the company expects to have more than doubled its business.

“I’m halfway there, in terms of where I want to be success-wise,” Hilfiger says. “‘When I was halfway here, I thought that when I reached this level, I wouldn’t need more. Any more fame, any more money, any more working hours, any more anything. But every time I reach a new level, I think, ‘What’s next?’ ”

Men’s cosmetics. Estee Lauder, a company that knows all it needs to about skin care, owns the license for Hilfiger’s fragrances. In him, they may have found the beauty industry’s Mr. Right, the man who can convince guys it’s OK to use moisturizer, sunscreen and night cream.

The polymorphous expansion Hilfiger’s company is projecting depends on brand loyalty, consumer trust in the man whose name is on all those labels. Customers figure, “I got a shirt from this guy. It was comfortable, it wore well, wasn’t too expensive. Yeah, I’d buy a towel from Tommy.” Or a watch, a wineglass, boots, a chair, after shave, a book. It’s going to be a Tommy world.