The Tanning of America Page 10

  The Street Is Main Street

  Tommy Hilfiger opened up his first business when he was eighteen years old while still in high school in Elmira, New York. A white teenager rebelling against his parents’ generation and their Little House on the Prairie values, as he would tell me, Tommy grew his hair long and wore bell-bottoms in defiance of the straitlaced, conservative styles and attitudes he saw around himself as a kid. With a dream to one day design clothes “for the people,” he decided to name his first business, a retail clothing store, the People’s Place. What began basically as a head shop that sold blue jeans, rolling papers, and rock records gained so much popularity that Tommy and his partners went on to open eight stores.

  When Tommy later sat down with me to talk about hip-hop’s influence on the design elements of the apparel, fragrance, accessory, and home furnishing lines that he ended up creating—and on his journey from rags to riches (pun intended)—he began his account in the mid-eighties. At that point in time, his jeans stores had closed down, following bankruptcy, and he had gone off to New York City. Armed with lessons learned at retail, after a brief apprenticeship designing at Jordache, Tommy found a backer, Mohan Murjani, then wanting to launch a male equivalent to Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. Going for it, before he had even made a name for himself in the design world, Tommy decided to build a clothing line—from the ground up.

  “What I did when I started my company,” he explained, “was based upon what I wanted to wear for myself.” He wanted “very hip clothes that were not stuffy like Ralph Lauren but were still American classics.” Taking cues from what he saw urban youth wearing on the street, Tommy Hilfiger began with more traditional designer looks and then revised and changed the apparel to make it hipper. How? “I redesigned the classics to make them oversized, wide, and colorful,” he answered. “And they were hip.” Not only that, but the business elements and style of marketing, with the red, white, and navy blue logo suggestive of a flag or a sideways H, had the same feel of a classic American company that was also fresh, colorful, and culturally inclusive. In almost no time, Tommy recalled, “people just embraced me.”

  So what was it that allowed the people to get to know him in the first place? Well, one of the most crazy, completely bold and daring instances of guerilla marketing strategies used by Murjani was to erect a big stark white billboard with crisp navy blue lettering in none other than Times Square. In keeping with the brash marketing approach of the 1980s, it was a classic positioning move but with an updated twist that was over-the-top even for those years. Putting him in the company of Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis, and Calvin Klein, the billboard used code—initials only—for introducing somebody that nobody had ever heard of, stating simply: “The Four Great American Designers. R.L., P.E., C.K., T.H.”

  Everyone was quick to recognize who the first three names were. But the question running around sophisticated Manhattan circles was Who exactly is this “T.H.”? Oh yeah, and when they found out, the answer came from the least likely of sources—kids from the streets. Those were “the people” that Tommy had begun to recognize as resources nobody else seemed to be observing. He started to pay serious attention to young urban consumers who were being inspired by hip-hop artists. After all, this was the same group that was also borrowing classic fashion statements and repurposing or reinventing them. Whenever he wanted inspiration, Tommy didn’t have to look any farther for his research than the inner-city streets of the boroughs surrounding Manhattan.

  As the company began to take off, whenever it was time to leave his office in the city and make the long drive home to Connecticut, he would often weave through the streets of Harlem to see how the kids were dressed. In addition to the profusion of hats, including baseball hats worn backward or sideways, one of the more obvious fashion statements coming out of the culture, especially for males, was wearing jeans that were lower than the underwear waistband.

  Two thoughts occurred. First, he was reminded of his own fashion rebellion; so instead of seeing the style as ridiculous, he embraced it as fantastic. Second, he saw a design and logo opportunity. If kids were wearing their jeans low, he decided, why not design underwear with a super-wide waistband that prominently featured an oversized, bold Tommy Hilfiger insignia? How did he know that it would resonate with urban consumers? Because he understood the hip-hop impoverished mind-set and realized that wearing your pants low was a style that made you cool and in with the culture, especially if you could show the waistband of your underwear with a designer logo. It was a way of saying to the world, See this glimpse of who I am? I’m badge-worthy. By respecting that mentality and designing into it, making the logos big and bright, Tommy Hilfiger was translating from the streets and speaking back to the consumers, with nuance and all. That awareness infused the whole line, whether it was underwear, accessories, shirts, jeans, whatever item of clothing that a proud person would wear and show to the world as a statement and testament of who he was—I ain’t got sh*t, but look at my shirt. It was code, as poetic as hip-hop lyrics, that was saying, Look at my style! I may come from nothing but I’m not this held-back human being who merits being disparaged. I got something; I am somebody. Look at what I’m wearing, check me out, yo!

  Tommy Hilfiger was able to translate all of that into a clothing line that took off running, thanks to the urban market that responded with love and loyalty from the get-go. By the early 1990s, after seeing Tommy Jeans go from zero to $500 million in revenues over a matter of five years, and with every other denim designer soon getting in on the act, it became clear that the urban youth stamp of approval was echoing out across cultural and generational lines. Even as you started to see baggy pants and ball caps turned backward in white, suburban neighborhoods, Hilfiger marketing consistently honored the market that had inspired and supported the brand early on. There was, for instance, the 1992 cross-promotion with Estée Lauder for the Tommy men’s fragrance that employed a print ad campaign, not with a celebrity or typical male model, but a handsome, strapping kid from Jamaica who wore big, funky dreads. Not your everyday mainstream image. But this hazy, crazy new idea—that images from the street were starting to become Main Street—was now coming into focus. Incredibly, the appeal of the ad earned so much attention for the fragrance that stores around the country couldn’t keep it in stock. Tommy told me that for ten years in a row his line of men’s fragrances held the number one, two, and three sales positions. “We won all the awards,” he said. “It was unheard of.”

  In keeping with the cross-pollination of hip-hop and sports, the mainstream arrival moment for the brand was probably with the Tommy jersey. There was a bold proud jersey for every passion, as he recalled: “football jerseys, basketball jerseys, baseball jerseys.” Hockey jerseys had never been part of street wear collections, mainly because of the high V-neck and oversized arms that were cut to go over the hefty padding worn by hockey players. Tommy saw an opening. “I did an authentic hockey jersey,” he remembered, “and put them in Bloomingdale’s for one hundred fifty a pop. Big numbers, embroideries, big logos, and labels. That was expensive twenty years ago for a shirt, but they blew up.” From there Hilfiger started sponsoring hockey teams. Next thing everyone knew, brand sponsorships led to teams that were playing under the banner of Hilfiger basketball and football.

  Although the streets were now converging and all leading to Fifth Avenue—or wherever its hip, high-style counterparts were in other places—whenever it was time to innovate, the brand always turned to the generation that first inspired it. For example, with these hockey shirts that came almost to the knees, Tommy and his design team saw that a lot of the kids would pull the crotch of their pants even lower. This presented something of a design challenge in terms of sizing. How could you put traditional sizes, say for a thirty-two-inch waist, on jeans when they weren’t being worn at the waist? The solution, Tommy said, was to go get consumer feedback, in return for free clothing. Sometimes they’d literally go out into the streets and talk to teenagers and have th
em try on the clothes, and other times they’d invite groups of young urban guys and gals up to the offices to interview them about fit and style preferences. Everyone benefited. In return for their expertise, the kids were given clothes that they would wear into the clubs at night, promoting product at the same time.

  Once it was rolling, the look became iconic—rugby silhouettes and unapologetic, oversized logos. Or then there was the stunning fold-out ad with the late Aaliyah. At the time, Tommy was starting to see a lot of urban girls in boys’ clothes but with their own feminine touches. Photographed in big baggy jeans, hanging low with high underwear, Aaliyah’s glamour was there, of course, with hair and makeup—and with her fingernails, which had been painted to spell out Tommy’s name. So hot! Another important influence and celebrity authenticator for Tommy Hilfiger, as it so happened, was Grand Puba, along with other hip-hop artists tapped for marketing. There was Usher early in his career, the Fugees, Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest, and even edgy rappers like Method Man, who famously appeared in haute couture showings as a runway model for the brand.

  Between this kind of hip-hop lineup—which would eventually include Notorious B.I.G. and, most notably, as we shall see, Snoop Dogg—and all the movement Tommy Hilfiger was getting from being name-checked in lyrics, he was golden. However, aside from the star power and really cool marketing and customer-friendly product innovations, there was a built-in ongoing campaign being run by young urban consumers. Tommy put it this way, telling me, “The street kids were my billboards. They were on every street corner and in every city in America wearing my name. You saw as many logos of mine on the street in the nineties as you did street signs or stop signs.”

  Actually, the only thing you might have seen on the street in the 1990s more readily than Tommy’s logo or street and stop signs was Gap stores. With the exception of Starbucks, probably no other megabrand was as synonymous with the decade as the Gap was—with its khakis, denims, cool colored T-shirts, and other moderately priced, quality-made casual wear that wasn’t too hip for the more brand averse but was still stylish enough for those who didn’t want to be seen as completely out of it. With its various divisions that included the high-end Banana Republic and the lower-cost Old Navy, as well as Gap Kids and Baby Gap, the company was said to have grown 26,000 percent in profits between 1984 and 1999—26,000 percent!

  Much of what it did to achieve such phenomenal growth was accomplished by paying attention to market and fashion trends, and then distilling the finer points and translating them into Gap’s own special language. As a result they were able to draft off of everything that the top designers were doing. What they seemed to miss, however, was the creativity of the smaller street-run companies that were also flourishing with hip-hop’s cultural expansion. And there was one such company, in particular, that the Gap hadn’t noticed—although they really should have.

  Known as FUBU, the company was founded in 1992 by Daymond John, from Hollis, Queens, along with a few friends, after they began buying T-shirts and hats in bulk and then selling them at local hip-hop concerts. While still working as a waiter at a Red Lobster restaurant, Daymond had picked up an interesting tie-top-style hat one day and then sat down at his mom’s sewing machine to try to knock it off. The next thing he knew, he had come up with a product that everybody wanted to buy from him. Before long, he was making the hats in quantities, while also designing his own clothing and accessory line. When it dawned on him one day that he needed a company name and a logo, he thought first about the fact that he and his friends were making clothes for themselves and their peers, and as part of hip-hop culture they were in business to elevate through style. The name “For Us By Us” sprang to life—FUBU for short.

  From there, as the story goes, he opened up a factory in his living room, still working his gig at the Red Lobster, and basically sold his wares out of the back of a van. That was until the FUBU executives managed to pool their resources and make it to their first trade show in Las Vegas—returning a few days later with orders for $400,000 worth of merchandise. And that was the beginning. Within a few years, FUBU had been embraced by urban consumers enough so that the company could afford to move up in the world—to an office in the Empire State Building. Much of the steady growth had happened by word of mouth alone.

  Since there had been no budget for mass or local advertising, the key to exposure was in a kind of product placement effort that was fairly common in rap circles. If you knew someone who knew LL Cool J, for instance, as was the case with Daymond John, whose wife went to high school with him, you would show up wherever he was, remind him how he knew you, and then ask if he wouldn’t mind putting on a shirt or a ball cap with a FUBU logo or a hanging tag and then snap a picture for a publicity one-sheet. That could get a clothing company huge mileage—just to have a logo spotted on a poet as prominent as LL Cool J, even in street flyers. Of course, the big get—whether you were Tommy Hilfiger or FUBU—was to achieve product placement in publicity or on television, that is, in a music video.

  When Daymond started coming around so often, trying to get his latest designs to LL, the rapper was initially resistant. But being the early adopter that he is, and because he really liked the FUBU designs and colors, and especially because of the economically empowering concept of For Us By Us, he went along. Then one day, as LL recalled to me, Daymond brought him a shirt and asked him to wear it in a photograph. He was planning on getting it covered by The Source.

  It was the 1990s and there was now a bible for anyone seriously interested in the doings of hip-hop, musically and culturally. The Source, founded by two white Harvard guys, was no mere gossip rag. Authoritative and opinionated, it was the only magazine devoted to rap.

  LL felt that he’d given lots of free publicity to help out FUBU. So instead of asking for a fee to do the photo, he proposed that they give him a share of the company. With that LL Cool J earned equity and became an owner, just in time to help spur FUBU’s healthy spike in sales. In addition to wearing the latest FUBU pieces in concert, in other publicity settings, and even on the NBC sitcom he did, LL also provided creative and design input.

  Maybe because LL Cool J had been part of hip-hop’s ride from the start, he may have had a deeper sense earlier on than most of us about what was happening in the minds of young Americans who were white and suburban yet being drawn to all aspects of the culture. He might not have had the language to speak about it yet in 1997 but my hunch is that the opportunity to help promote an African-American-owned and -run start-up like FUBU and help bring awareness to it from outsiders was an appealing way of being a cultural ambassador. Which is, by the way, what hip-hop was doing naturally, not by having to stage a self-conscious Benetton ad full of different colors of people, but by sketching an arc to take in all backgrounds.

  Such a collective in which people of diverse ethnic heritage live can best be described with an anthropological term that we at Translation have updated and rebranded for its potent marketing applications. The word is “polyethnic.”

  pol•y•eth•nic (pol-ē-eth-nik): In twenty-first-century terms, this adjective refers to the individuals that form the new diverse culture in which we live. Because of America’s ever-increasing numbers of interracial marriages and an unprecedented leap in ostensibly polyethnic births, we are giving rise to children whose ethnicity is often vastly different from who they are culturally.

  When understood in this context, it makes sense that the reason why the standard silos for African-American, Hispanic, General Market, and so on, began to no longer apply over a decade ago. Marketers who recognized the challenge realized that they needed new tools for cultural diplomacy, even if they didn’t know how to use them. This was how the opportunity to be just such an ambassador arose for LL when he was hired by the Gap in 1997 to help them reclaim some of the luster of coolness that they were beginning to lose. And what LL Cool J did to seize the moment remains, to this day, one of the most unapologetic, bold, and daring things I’ve ever seen
anyone do in my life.

  Upon arriving at the set to shoot his commercial, LL happened to be wearing a FUBU hat, and as he came out of the dressing room in his Gap outfit, he decided not to take it off. A wardrobe coordinator might have told him to remove it, but when he didn’t, nobody persisted. After all, the Gap executives were looking to him as a rap artist, a musician, not as a cultural force. Not having paid enough attention to the street, they had no idea what FUBU was anyway. Apparently no one looked at his lyrics before they shot the commercial. Did anyone check any kind of script he might have brought? Most likely, they didn’t. So then, when cameras rolled and he did his bit, nobody knew what he meant when he threw in a rhyming lyric that went, “For Us, By Us, on the low.”

  What? When I saw it on TV, as best as I can remember, it was like being hit by lightning. Nobody did that! My conclusion was that none of the executives had a clue about code or that hip-hop could have its own language or that he had just piggybacked FUBU onto the Gap’s megabrand global mass-marketing ad campaign. This was the Gap, and there wasn’t even a culturally connected person in the room or someone who knew a culturally connected person? That’s how novice most corporations were in their understanding of the force that hip-hop had become. The Gap executives in that case had no way to calculate that what LL Cool J had just done by shouting out another brand and telling listeners in code to buy “on the low”—via word of mouth, like a street drug—was about to unleash contagious consumer behavior at a mass level. The Gap must have wanted so badly to be part of the new tan culture that they were willing not to know or care what LL had said. As he would later report, they did eventually figure it out but weren’t too upset. Why should they be? They were now cool by association. And FUBU went galactic.