Today, Tommy Hilfiger is a global fashion brand, but did you know that it had its humble beginnings in Mumbai? American fashion designer Thomas Jacob Hilfiger, popularly known as Tommy Hilfiger, made the interesting revelation in a fireside chat with Indian models Manushi Chhillar and Sarah Jane Dias in Mumbai at the Bandra Kurla Complex store earlier today.
He shares, “I started my career designing my first collection ever in a factory in Santacruz, and it was really the very beginning of my career. It was over 40 years ago, and I’ve kept coming back since.” Dressed in a navy-blue jacket by the namesake, a powder blue shirt, that he paired with cream-coloured pants, and white sneakers, he looked dapper as ever. Interestingly, ever since he made this connection with India, Hilfiger said he has been loving the food and the ambiance.
Diving deeper, he adds, “I am a tandoori kind of guy, but I would also take butter chicken.”
Interestingly, this year also marks 40 years of the brand in its existence and shares his Indian connection. “When I launched the brands as a young designer, I was partners with Mohan Murjani. At the time, he owned the company called Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, and he and his family were manufacturing mainly in Hong Kong. When I met him, I was in the process of going to join Calvin Klein. When he asked me what I was doing, I said, ‘I am going to work for Calvin Klein’ and he said, ‘don’t do that, let’s start Tommy Hilfiger together’. So, we started the brand together in 1985, and that was 40 years ago.”
Reminiscing his first collection, the American fashion designer said, “My first-ever collection that I designed for myself was casual, preppy, all-American sporty clothes, but I wanted mine to be much more relaxed and cool clothes, rather than being stiff and formal.” This he believes was the “casualisation” of America to the world and describes the clothes as “chic casual”.
When asked what trend he would like to see come back, he concludes, “What goes around comes around. It always cycles back. Maybe in a slightly different way, but over the years, trends have been trends for a reason. When they come back, they come back because they haven’t been active for a while, and they look fresh and new because of being maybe dormant or stationery for a certain time. They need to be reinterpreted, and they need to be reinvented.”