Influx

Tommy Hilfiger is attempting a drastic repositioning. They’ve cut all the old marketing material featuring logo-centric, hip-hop style baggy clothes. The new image features advertising with attractive, vaguely privileged-looking, distinctly un-urban models relaxing on beaches wearing subtly logoed trunks.

Ten years ago, the Tommy Hilfiger logo was an emblem of street affluence, playing on urban aspirations of upward mobility and suburbia’s lust for hip-hop wear. What Tommy execs are now acknowledging as a defeated withdrawal from this positioning is characteristic of a general trend in urban markets.

Tommy diluted the meaning it once had by mass-marketing to the point of saturation and, like Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren, is now being edged out of the urban market by more street-credible designers (FUBU, Ecko, Sean John and J. Lo) who better understand the target subcultures. To the young urban teen and the suburban imitator, it’s now cooler to show solidarity with local, grassroots companies that come from (or appear to come from) within the subculture, than to show off expensive emblems that come from outside.
New York Times article: Reinventing Tommy