The all-American dreamer

Tommy Hilfiger takes you back to the 1960s with its boho hippie culture and heady music

AMERICAN DREAMER

My Life on Fashion and Business

Tommy Hilfiger (with Peter Knobler)

Penguin Random House

337 pages; Rs 799

In December, I came across an article about Tommy Hilfiger wanting to sell his ultra-rare 2003 Ferrari Enzo, one of the 400 ever made. The Ferrari, it said, might fetch $3 million at auction. “My lifestyle is changing,” Hilfiger was quoted as saying. “I don’t drive fast sports cars as I used to.”

I shrugged as an image of a man with an extravagant and enviable lifestyle formed in my mind. This was before I read his autobiography, which is a candid story of a self-proclaimed dreamer who resolutely worked his way up from nothing to create a unique “preppy, all-American classic” fashion brand that would go on to dress celebrities like Britney Spears and Beyoncé.

In a very readable American Dreamer: My Life on Fashion and Business, Mr Hilfiger bares it all: The difficult childhood, the struggle, the setbacks and also some terribly embarrassing moments. And he does so with the straightforward honesty of a man who has picked up every lesson – good, bad, ugly – that life sent his way and worked on it.

Mr Hilfiger relives his life, chronologically, starting from a childhood cramped in Elmira, New York, struggling with dyslexia, while growing up in a noisy household with eight siblings and a perpetually angry father, for whom the son always falls short of expectation. It is a far from ideal situation, but Hilfiger seems to have a gift: Of dreams. Dreams of getting away, a better life and better things. 

Early in the book one is struck by his photographic memory. He remembers names, people and places with rare clarity. This is particularly evident in the chapter titled “Uniforms”, which he describes as his first inspiration: Blue-and-gold flocked script lettering on sports jerseys, brown-and-orange uniforms against a white background, jackets made of wool melton, with leather sleeves and stripes on the cuffs.

He introduces you to the world of a boy who not only craves good things, but also has it in him to go all out to earn them through sheer hard work. He longs for a pair of low-cut Converse sneakers and goes into a money-making overdrive, “raking more leaves, mowing more lawns, delivering more newspapers” to buy them. Then he gets passionate about cars and works harder to buy one, and then finds ways of trading it for another that he likes better. Here’s a hard-working dream catcher.

Through it all his five sisters keep him updated with the latest fashion trends. He soaks in the fashion of the time. In school, unlike the other boys who “checked out faces and figures” of girls, he looks at the clothes they wear.

While he is still in high school, he and two of his friends open a clothes store in an unused basement of a building and they call it “People’s Place”. They have no experience but they have an eye for style and they drive down to New York every other day to source the stuff to sell at Elmira, which they call “a wasteland”. People’s Place is an overnight success with its bellbottoms, jewellery, candles and incense. There are nostalgic pictures of it in the book.

Mr Hilfiger takes you back to the 1960s with its boho hippie culture and heady music, into the dizzy world of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin. It is the age of the rebel and Hilfiger is in the thick of it, expressing it through fashion, but he also candidly admits to his drug use and intense partying. It’s here that you also spot a difference between him and his partners at People’s Place. 

While they are happy with retailing clothes, he  is hungry for more. He wants to design clothes. He wants to be the one deciding the cut, the size, shape and position of the pockets, the fabric and the colours.

He seems to know what’s going to take off next. If it is stone-washed, bleached jeans, he’s already predicted the trend. He has it worked out in his head, but does not have enough in his pocket to pull it off.

He also does not have the experience of a businessman. That becomes clear when People’s Place, which has expanded like crazy and over-inventoried, faces bankruptcy.

This is also evident when he gets conned by Muna Baig of Mumbai. Mr Baig invites Hilfiger to his factory in Mumbai, hosts him for four weeks at his house, manufactures his creations, but is not willing to pay him until the clothes have been shipped and the stores have paid him. There is a fallout and the next thing Mr Hilfiger finds are his creations being sold by Baig at Bloomingdale’s in New York City under the name of Tommy Hill. Here are Mr Hilfiger’s creations for which he gets no credit and no money.

Years later, Mr Hilfiger would buy Tommy Hill from Mr Baig.

There are several other such stories, told without any bitterness. There are stories of work consuming personal life, a marriage falling apart, of how designers get their ideas. 

There are some awfully embarrassing stories too, like the time in India when his stomach acts up during a factory visit. While there is a toilet in the factory, there is no toilet paper or water. So he cleans himself up with his underwear which he then hurls out of the window, royally soiled, only to have it returned to him by a factory employee.

You see him slogging, being a one-man army, picking fabrics, including from Chandni Chowk, designing the clothes, running to the factories, getting them made and then lugging them to designer stores to have his creations accepted.

It is with no small effort that Tommy Hilfiger, the brand named after the man came about. Mr Hilfiger clearly earned that Ferrari and all those other sports cars.