The Hilfiger Factor and the Flexible Commercial World of Coutureconsultant,^31 Hilfiger commented that his new line was created for celebrities
such as rock stars. Aping couture’s own in-house trickle-down processes, he
launched his own elite designer range of red, white and blue, leather jackets,
Texas boots and jeans, which are to be copied in the cheaper lines. As the
year 2000 commenced, the London Red Label outlet was to be found at
Tommy Hilfiger, 51 New Bond Street.
Like every other ‘designer’ product, the logo is essential to Hilfiger’s success
as it is with other ‘designer’ companies. Every franchised designer product
bears this badge of official status (or a faked version, but that is another
story), which enables these goods to be sold far beyond their actual value.
Brand logos have become talismanic symbols of glamour and desirability
which lift products to heights of desirability unattainable by Marks &
Spencers, as the company has recently learned to its cost and as Hilfiger is
very clearly aware.
Couture ReactionWhat we are looking at here in the ‘value’ of designer logos is designer goods
as magical symbols of the glamour world of international fame, beauty,
success and style. The world of couture and top prêt-à-porter offers the public
a tantalizingly beyond-reach image of the fabulous and the elegant – a magical
aspiration. Grant McCracken in his book Culture and Consumption calls it
a process of displaced meaning – namely that top designer objects act as a
bridge to the ideal luxury world.^32 The perfume bottle by Jean Paul Gaultier
at £30 is attainable whilst the Gaultier dress at £1,300 is not. We can buy
Dior perfume instead of the beaded fantasy dress by Galliano at Dior worth
many thousands of pounds. These purchases attach us directly through
product ownership to the couture world and through that we enter our world
of dreams. It is almost a process of sympathetic magic. We can never own a
£1,000 McQueen dress from Givenchy but we can make ourselves believe
that we ‘own’ the Givenchy glamour through one squirt of a Givenchy ‘Fleur
Interdit’ vaporisateur (£9.95, Harrods sale, 1997). It is this process that the
big designer houses have long understood and exploited so cleverly. Since
the 1950s and even as the great fashion monopoly conglomerates of Prada,
Gucci, LVMH and Louis Vuitton gobble up ownership of one great couture
salon after another, enormous care is taken to guard the individual sacred
- Rebecca Lowthorpe, Independent,16 February, 2000, with thanks to Amy de la Haye.
- McCracken, G., Culture and Consumption: new approaches to the symbolic character
of consumption, Indiana Univ. Press, 1988.