And yet it’s not the brand’s hip hop heyday that Rose chose to explore for her new collection. “It would have been a comfortable way to go, but I don’t like to be comfortable,” she explains. Instead, she found herself deeply fascinated by the preppy Ivy League aesthetic that propelled Hilfiger to set up shop with his eponymous menswear label back in the mid-’80s.
In Rose’s hands, all the familiar tropes Hilfiger became famous for are upended and reimagined with a decidedly boundary-pushing verve. The 35-piece collection includes everything from jock straps, boxer briefs as shorts, and, if you can believe it, an especially cheeky pair of chinos-turned-chaps. Rose’s signature exploded proportions show up in the lineup too: there’s the suede car shoe with an extended square toe-box, a dressing gown that basically doubles as a coat, and a massively oversized Hawaiian print shirt—Rose’s personal favorite—which seems destined for street style peacockdom.
“I always like to bring in these tensions, it felt really fun to play with this waspy character,” she says. “We created all kinds of stories about this made-up person shuffling around in their slippers and their jockstrap by the pool. And Tommy was really open to it.”
Rose enlisted the help of rising art star Buck Ellison to bring those stories to life. The Los Angeles-based conceptual photographer made waves at the Whitney Biennial this year with his depictions of the ultra rich—one series in the show staged the imagined interior life of Erik Prince, the financier and founder of the notorious private security firm Blackwater, for example. Ellison and Rose chose to invert that tableau of powerful white masculinity for the campaign, casting two gay couples of color to play the leading roles. You see them happily ensconced in the American dream: frollicking on inflatable beds in the pool, playing fetch with their dog by a white picket fence, reading the Sunday papers together outstretched on pristine white sofas. “We wanted to show couples who are never represented in those spaces, challenge that idea a little,” she says, “and, I guess, start a conversation.”
Ever since Louis Vuitton CEO Michael Burke was spotted front row at the designer’s show in London this past June, the conversation has been swirling around Rose as a possible contender at the French house. Understandably though, it’s not the kind of chatter that she is willing to entertain right now. “I’m a British brand, and I’m here to stay,” she says. She is, however, more than happy to discuss her recently announced guest designer spot with Pitti Uomo next January. “I’m really excited. We’re actually working on that now,” she says beaming; in the background of the zoom screen, a large board covered with polaroids is a clear sign that work is in progress. “I’ve never really done a show outside London. And I think it’s going to be the same mindset, it’s sort of like, How do I apply my aesthetic to another city?” If her new transatlantic collab is anything to go by, then the Italians are in for a real treat.
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