74906.pdf

The Hilfiger Factor and the Flexible Commercial World of Couture

Commercial Competition

By the 1980s Paris was, however, being seriously and successfully rivalled
for international designer leadership by New York designers such as Calvin
Klein, Ralph Lauren and Donna Karan, all of whom were also widely selling
franchised products. Rivalry steadily grew also from the great Italian fashion
companies in Milan of Versace, Armani, Gucci et al and from Issey Miyake
and others in Tokyo. Below these in status but not business terms, however,
lay another layer of commercial threat to elite fashion manufacture. This
was competition from the US-driven leisure and sportswear markets such as
Levis, Adidas, Nike, Reebok, Nautica, Guess, Gap, Hilfiger and many others.
Through the 1990s the extent of the product retailing of these companies
reached global proportions never before known in the garment and accessory
industries.
That the products of these specific mass production companies are literally
in every way thousands of miles apart from those of the couture world in
cultural terms goes without saying. Yet the great design houses had much to
learn from leisurewear marketing methods. Specifically, they quickly came
to terms with the vast commercial harvest to be reaped from attaching their
own elite names to very ordinary clothing. Thus by the 1990s they too added
their own jeans and even trainers on to their list of branded spin-off products.
The Guardian Weekend of 3 April 1999, for example, featured as a high-
fashion item, ‘“Quick trainers” from Hermes’ at £290. By adding on a few
feathers, a logo and some machine embroidery ordinary jeans became
‘designer’ jeans and could be sold at highly inflated prices.
Thus, the worlds of elite couture and mass casual wear clashed for the
first time in direct commercial competition for the same mass consumers.
Profits to the parent retailing companies, who now own the couture salons,
were unprecedented. The French retail group Pinault-Printemps Redoute paid
‘$3bn (£1.85bn) for 40% of Gucci’, in 1999, for example, whilst the next
day its takeover rival, LVMH, ‘tabled an $8 billion offer’.^25

The Hilfiger Factor

By the late 1990s, as the success of Tommy Hilfiger’s company reached global
proportions, the Hilfiger Factor reared its head as a serious commercial
challenge to the couture world. This Hilfiger crisis stemmed from the massive
popular success of the products of these casual leisurewear companies. Success

25.Independent, 22 March 1999.