Tommy Hilfiger And FRGMT Take ’90s Prep Back TO Tokyo

Long before he became one of the most cited figures in Japanese streetwear, Hiroshi Fujiwara was a teenager in Tokyo listening to punk and fixating on whatever the bands coming out of London happened to be wearing, and when he finally made it to London in the 1980s, the people he met there told him to keep going to New York because that was where the new things were happening. He took the advice and found hip-hop there, and years later, working as a DJ, he began to notice that the artists he admired were wearing Tommy Hilfiger in a way the brand had never quite intended. “They wore it very baggy and oversized, which gave the clothes a completely different impression from how they were originally designed,” Fujiwara recalls. “I liked that attitude. It was very memorable.”

That memory sits at the centre of TOMMY HILFIGER X FRGMT, a limited capsule that launched globally on 15 October and sends the brand back to its 1990s wardrobe, the period when its oversized and brightly coloured take on American prep was picked up by rappers and carried through the music scenes of the decade. Hilfiger, whose own route into clothing began at 18 with People’s Place, a store where young people came as much for the records as for the clothes, remembers the era as one that slipped out of the brand’s control in the best possible way. “Artists and rappers embraced those pieces and started wearing them in their own way, taking the look somewhere we could never have planned,” he says.

Fujiwara began by working through the Tommy Hilfiger archive, and the pieces he settled on are the ones most people would recognise as the core of the label, with the rugby shirt, button-down, varsity jacket, chino and field jacket appearing next to archival favourites including the Regatta jacket and the sailing polo, as well as a duffel bag. FRGMT’s thunderbolt graphics and polka dots run throughout, while the Tommy Flag, usually the most recognisable use of the brand’s national colours, has been redone in light blue. The fabrics follow the originals but have been upgraded into soft flannel check shirting, dry cotton jersey, washed nylon and heavyweight cotton twill. “I wanted to see how much I could change while still respecting what the brand has built over the years,” Fujiwara says, and Hilfiger describes the result as a meeting point where Fujiwara’s “precision and restraint against our bold American prep creates an interesting tension.”

The accompanying campaign is a quick, social-first film shot across New York, taking the uptown prep of the clothes into a world of skating and spontaneous movement around the city, which suits a collection built on the idea of clothes being worn differently from how they were designed. Fujiwara is open about expecting the capsule to land in two ways depending on who is looking at it, since for those who were there in the ’90s it may read as nostalgia while for a younger audience it may feel entirely new, and he says he is most interested in seeing how that younger audience chooses to wear it.

TOMMY HILFIGER X FRGMT is available now in selected Tommy Hilfiger stores worldwide and on tommy.com