The Hilfiger Factor and the Flexible Commercial World of Couturethat the likes of Hilfiger could never possibly achieve. Elite advertisements
featured very young, bejewelled, gilded, beautiful, fantasy women next to
elegant glass bottles, or peering into logoed handbags or wearing elegant
branded shoes. What we are seeing here again is the classic flexibility of the
trade. Let no consumers escape the magical lure, from Saudi princesses, to
opulent Russian mafiosi new rich, to Hollywood stars given free couture
clothes to wear to the Oscar Awards nights. Above all, the appeal must be
to the cross-channel ferry passenger or the package tourist waiting for hours
in the airport lounge. Tamsin Blanchard headlined her Paris report on the
21st January 1998 for the Independent with the line ‘What Lagerfeld Knows
and Galliano Knows Not’. She slated Galliano’s collection for being too
fantastic and romantic. ‘If the sole purpose of a couture show is to sell perfume
and be a glorified advertisement, then the entire concept of haute couture is
indeed a wonderful poetic and fantastic sham.’ But, perhaps the existence of
companies, such as Dior, does indeed depend on creating precisely this image
of poetry and fantasy. The Dior company very deliberately and evidently
with careful commercial forethought, uses Galliano’s couture fantasy in all
its glossy advertisements for its franchised products. A survey of Dior
advertisements (and Chanel, Gucci, Versace, etc.) taken out in Vogue’s
international editions for Poland, Singapore, Paris, Milan, London, New
York, Moscow and Tokyo, reveals the very same fantasy images across the
world.
Couture Victory?And it seems that the famous salons may have successfully already seen off
any serious commercial threat from the Hilfiger factor. To much surprise, by
February of the year 2000, Hilfiger shares were slipping badly. ‘So what has
gone wrong?, asked John Harris in the Independent on 8 February. ‘The
company is in deep trouble – the share price... has fallen by two thirds in
the last six months, wiping £1.5 bn off its market value.’
Part of the problem had been caused by the new, supposedly elite Red
Label line which had failed to impress and was described by Rebecca
Lowthorpe in the Independent of 24 February 2000 as ‘something of a
disaster’. Despite the logic that lay behind the launch of the Red Tab line
and despite the huge marketing efforts thrown into launching the clothes,
Hilfiger has been quite unable to reproduce the carefully honed ‘beyond
reality’ design elitism of couture garments. Unlike a couture salon which
starts from a position of cultural elitism and then downmarkets its mass-
franchised products, Hilfiger has not yet been able to make a financial success