‘It was a perfect storm. I was dressing Tupac’: Tommy Hilfiger on fashion, race and aspiration
In the early 1980s, Andy Warhol invited Tommy Hilfiger for a tour around the Factory. At the time Hilfiger was a relative fashion unknown. He had just started designing clothes and launched a few fashion lines called Century Survival and Click Point. When he arrived at the Factory to meet his hero, Warhol was working on a Marilyn.
“But he was also making movies, he was photographing celebrities, he was silkscreen-painting celebrities. Then he’d be out at Studio 54 handing out his own magazine. I said to him, ‘Why do you do all of this?’ and he said, ‘Because I like to.’”
Hilfiger, 71, is talking to me at the giant Tommy Hilfiger archive in Queens, New York, a Warholian temple of his own work and designs – whole rooms covered in photos of Hilfiger alongside heroes of music and sport, everything from baby clothes to disposable cameras slapped with his familiar emblem, rails and rails of clothes bearing his name.
Hilfiger says Warhol transformed his approach to fashion. He showed him the power of symbolism, how one striking design can speak to something greater.
“It was so powerful, like an infusion or some sort of a drip. I was so profoundly inspired by Warhol. I started to
