In 1985, the Tommy Hilfiger Corporation was founded to produce preppy fashion for a more casual, mainstream market. The designer stated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Hilfiger
“[Wanting to form my own eponymous line] came from a desire to create something that wasn’t out there already. I was really in tune with the market—I knew what existed, and I wanted this to be different. Maybe it’s the small-town boy in me, but I’ve always loved the prep school look, traditional Ivy League, and the clothes that sailors and jocks wear. I wanted to take these familiar old things and give them a more laid-back attitude, to make them modern and cool.”
Hilfiger was also inspired by “subcultures” in the music industry.
A professed lifelong fan of rock and roll, Hilfiger’s collections are often influenced by the fashion of music subcultures.
Word on the street back in the 1990s was that Hilfiger was inspired by African American designers of men’s clothes. In particular, Hilfiger was inspired by their earth-toned panel shirts for men that were loose, longs-sleeved, and buttoned down. Hilfiger took this design and shifted to bright primary colors and marketed it as a fun preppie design. In a way, Hilfiger did what the early Beatles had done by:
- taking “rhythm and blues” and
- making it more fun, whimsical, mainstream, and approachable, but
- also keeping it clean, classy, and formal.
That’s a perfect recipe for artistic success and a difficult balancing act. It’s also another case of getting rich by rebranding a minority’s creativity (although rebranding is itself a creative endeavor).
Unfortunately, none of the above can be confirmed because there is no trace of it on the Internet. And that’s a shame because the old whispered rumors of the Hilfiger origin story triggered everything written below.
The 1980s was also the period when Benetton rose to fame through its controversial shock advertising campaign.
Under the guise of enlightened progressive politics, Benetton aimed to trigger a reactionary repulsion — for example, to racial integration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benetton_Group
Benetton is known for its sports sponsorships, and for its “United Colors” advertising campaign. In 1982, Benetton hired Oliviero Toscani as creative director, which led to a change in advertising focus towards raising awareness for various issues worldwide.[12] In 1984, Toscani photographed the first multiracial ad for the brand.[3]
In 1989, Toscani refocused Benetton’s advertising strategy under the “United Colors of Benetton” campaign. The campaign’s graphic, billboard-sized ads depicted a variety of shocking subjects, including the deathbed scene of a man (AIDS activist David Kirby) dying from AIDS.[13] Another ad featured a bloodied, unwashed newborn baby with umbilical cord still attached. The newborn ad prompted roughly 650 complaints to the British Advertising Standards Authority, which noted in its 1991 annual report that the Benetton baby ad “attracted more complaints than we have ever previously known.”[14] A third ad included a black stallion copulating with a white mare,[15] while a fourth advert showed a light-skinned girl with blond hair hugging a dark-skinned boy whose hair was shaped into devil horns.[16]
In 2000, Benetton was included in the reference publication Guinness World Records for the “Most Controversial Campaign.”[17]
In November 2011, Benetton created the UNHATE Foundation, launching a worldwide communication campaign described as an invitation to leaders and citizens of the world to combat the “culture of hatred.”
In some ways, Ralph Lauren’s 2022 Polo advertising campaign has the fashion sense of Tommy Hilfiger in the 1980s, with the primary colors of a McDonald’s restaurant applied to preppie fashion. It also has Benetton’s advertising hallmark of conspicuous racial diversity, but with shock value replaced by elite appeal.
To be sure, Ralph Lauren’s 2022 Polo is tasteful and excellent. But it doesn’t seem original and daring or brilliant. The preppie aspect brings to mind the critique of Ivy League graduates as “excellent sheep” with perfect SAT scores. In retrospect, while Benetton’s shock campaign represented 1980s capitalism at its most cynical, it was bold and imaginative. Likewise, Tommy Hilfiger was also genuinely new and invigorating, with its fun, modernized take on stodgy upper-class, east-coast clothing. Fashion always involves recycling old ideas, but with an inspired new twist. That does not seem to exist today. That is, Ralph Lauren’s Polo seems to aim (unconsciously?) for a sweet spot of the 1980s, without the innovation of the 1980s.
First, none of the above can be confirmed, especially by we outsiders who do not live in Manhattan nor work in fashion. So everything above is admittedly free association regarding what by all accounts seems to be an thoroughly amoral yet captivating fashion industry.
Second, this is just one more take on the theme of stagnation which has become so popular.
This sterile nostalgia is reminiscent of the past several years. The 2020 protests gave off a kind of retro cosplay vibe of the 1960s, like Coachella or Burning Man. The 2022 Supreme Court is likewise a fantasy simulation of the 1950s uncoupled from a true conservatism that would evolve to solve practical modern problems even while committed to maintaining legal continuity by observing precedent. (The abortion rate of American Catholics is the same as the general American population.)
Cultural stagnation touches on the subject of nostalgia, which might be stronger in the political realm than in the realm of fashion. After all, it’s normal to recycle the obscure fashions of their grandparents for a younger generation that has a naive sense of fun about the past. For example, when the movie “Bonnie and Clyde” came out in 1967, it generated a fashion craze for the forgotten styles and clothing of the 1920s and 1930s — which would probably have seemed peculiar for those who lived through the First World War, the “Spanish flu” pandemic, and the Great Depression. That is, the movie was politically conscious in that it was set during the Great Depression, but the fads inspired by the movie seem depoliticized. Likewise, “That ’70s Show” debuted in 1998, but it portrayed the 1970s as a time of innocence and blandness, with the adults locked into the 1950s and the hip kids more like creatures of the generic 1980s. And maybe the current discussion of decadence and creative stagnation has its own nostalgia and might overlook the darkness and disintegration of eras like the 1970s that were creative but were characterized by tumult and anomie. Perhaps those who live in chaotic times yearn for a wholesome past (and so Reagan got elected), whereas those who live in a period of peace and relative prosperity worry about economic, cultural, and moral stagnation and decadence. So, on television in the 2000s, the 1970s was a golden age of innocence, while for cinema buffs, the 1970s was the high point of the bold New Hollywood that washed away the stale studio system.
It’s not surprising that people tend to have a nostalgia for periods of time that they did not live through. But what about those who have a very strong nostalgia for a period of time that they did live through? It could be that they are really thinking about personal memories as opposed to social history. For example, during the protests of 2020, it was often stated that “2020 was 1968 all over again”. This raised to prominence models of cyclical political history that Peter Turchin has most recently revitalized by illustrating underlying cycles of economic inequality. This seems ominously valid as work by economists who study inequality has moved into the mainstream. However, 1968 was a special case because all over the world there was civil unrest and a breakdown of authority, even in radically egalitarian China under Mao. In contrast, the protests of 2020 were quite limited and mild compared to 1968 — and mostly limited to the USA — and political scientists (and Turchin, IIRC) are warning that the real unrest and political polarization is going to happen the future and is not behind us. Also, in the USA, 1968 was the year that the civil rights movement largely unraveled. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were breakthroughs but a sense of disappointment set in soon after because the legal revolution did not lead to an immediate social and economic transformation. It could be argued that the riots of 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King brought an end to the civil rights movement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_riots
But 1968 was also the year of the riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The protests at the convention related to the Vietnam War and not the civil rights movement. Moreover, this has been described as a “police riot” because it was the police who were engaged in violence against almost any civilian in the vicinity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Democratic_National_Convention_protests
Protest activity against the Vietnam War took place prior to and during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
In 1968, counterculture and anti-Vietnam War protest groups began planning protests and demonstrations in response to the convention, and the city promised to maintain law and order. The protesters were met by the Chicago Police Department in the streets and parks of Chicago before and during the convention, including indiscriminate police violence against protesters, reporters, photographers, and bystanders that was later described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence as a “police riot“.[1][2]
During the evening of August 28, 1968, with the police riot in full swing on Michigan Avenue in front of the Democratic party’s convention headquarters, the Conrad Hilton hotel, television networks broadcast live as the anti-war protesters began the now-iconic chant “The whole world is watching“.
When the older generation of Baby Boomers stated that “2020 is 1968 all over again”, it was this police riot against young white protesters opposed to the Vietnam War that might have been what they were referring to — and not the civil rights movement.
Also, to some extent the Baby Boomers might be thinking of the Woodstock concert of 1969 when they think of the “revolution of 1968”. For them, the real transformation was personal, with their embrace of critical thought, creativity, and individualism (and new forms of consumerism and conformity), and their sharp break from their parents’ stoic ethic of duty.
