Sunday night at London Collections Men has become Tommy Hilfiger night, when the designer from Elmira, New York, jets in to check in with the Brits.
Alongside British GQ’s editor Dylan Jones, Hilfiger cohosted this season’s dinner at Morton’s on Berkeley Square. Being menswear, it was male models galore. As Caroline Issa noted: “I’m sitting in between Jack Guinness and Henry Lloyd-Hughes, and opposite Oliver Cheshire and David Gandy. So I can’t complain!” Other professional Adonises making light work of the beetroot tart and Aberdeen Angus included Andrés Velencoso, Paul Sculfor, Robert Konjic, Johannes Huebl, and man-of-the-moment Lucky Blue Smith.
Smith had just walked in his first show of the season, for Jeremy Scott and Moschino—and, like Issa, seemed pretty pleased with his lot. “I opened and closed it—that was cool. The first look, I was wearing the pink suit with the blue shirt and the yellow tie. There was a lot of pattern and it was really cool. Those glasses were pretty hard to see through—but we made it out alive,” he said. “And the last look was a whole bunch of colors—a full look—and I liked that one the most.”
He’s now a runway veteran of one year and is on hold for “a whole bunch” of shows in Milan and Paris, too. So what has he learned? “Being in this whole fashion industry, seeing it firsthand, I never realized just how much work goes into everything,” he said. “Designers want their clothes and their shows to be absolutely perfect, exactly as they imagined, and there is a great deal of work that goes into doing that. Some collections can tell a whole story, from the first look to the last. The way the colors and the clothes transition is very interesting.”
Smith has to keep which collections he’s booked for close to his chest, so there’s no way to know whether he’ll be there when Tommy Hilfiger shows at New York’s second men’s week. So what draws Hilfiger—whose menswear attentions are focused on supporting the nascent New York show schedule—to keep returning to London to throw his fine party here? “I love London. I love the food, the shopping, the ambiance—it’s a very civilized environment.” Plus, of course, the clothes: “London is sartorial. I love the whole bespoke aspect of Savile Row. I go to Anderson & Sheppard and I love it. To me it’s the authenticity that counts. To be fitted by these incredible tailors and have them look at every single detail and make a suit that fits so incredibly well. They measure all of you—even the fat parts!”
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