PHOTOS: Tommy Hilfiger Earns His Stripes

by Justin Fenner | 11:31 am, February 13th, 2011

You wouldn’t expect a venerated American fashion house to draw inspiration from of-the-moment indie music, but Tommy Hilfiger did just that for his fall 2011 men’s collection. The designer played Best Coast‘s Boyfriend while he sent models on a trek through The Lion, a restaurant in New York’s West Village. All 25 looks evoked a boyish yet sophisticated independence — think Chuck Bass relocating to the Lower East Side, and you’ve got a good idea of what Hilfiger was going for. (Come to think of it, that’s probably why Gossip Girl‘s Ed Westwick got prime seating at the show.)

There were the requisite rugby stripes, of course, blown up and applied to everything from pea coats to the ankles of tailored sweatpants. There were the standard cashmere blazers and plenty of trim trousers, too. But the clothes simply refused to be stodgy and expected — pocket squares, cloth ties, leather piping and a slew of other smartly chosen details kept the entire collection fresh. The purple suit model David Agbodji wears in slide 5 might just be the most rakish thing we’ve seen all week.

Check out our five favorite looks from the collection and tell us what you think.

You are seeing this message because you have javascript disabled. To use our slideshows you need to enable javascript. There's no cross domain hackery or tracking voodoo, it's just some sweet jQuery animations. Please, think of the animations.