Tommy - The “Real American Fragrance” That Started It All For Me
Main image source: www.haw-lin.com
Note 1: I realize it can be confusing to distinguish between Tommy Hilfiger the person, Tommy Hilfiger the brand and Tommy the fragrance. I’ve tried my best to be clear in my writing but the key clarification here is that if I just write “Tommy” it refers to the fragrance.
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Designer houses devote a lot of time and resources to making fragrances that are a standalone part of their portfolio. However, I don’t think it would be unfair to say that the fragrances are not only an end unto themselves, but also a key aspect of a luxury brand’s portfolio and marketing strategy: fragrances allow luxury brands to go “downmarket” and reach a much broader customer base than they would with their pricier offerings, without actually going downmarket and risking their brand equity.
Think about it: Hermès is never going to make a cheap wallet, but if you can’t afford 500 bucks for a hand-stitched leather card case, perhaps you can treat yourself to a bottle of Terre d’Hermès and still capture a little bit of that magic (by the way, I’ve heard that sunglasses are another category that serves a similar purpose).
I don’t mean AT ALL to put down anyone who’s found themselves in this situation, because this is me now (I’m not head-to-toe in Armani but I still love a fragrance or two from the house), and it was me in middle school, waaaaaay back in the mid-90s.
I’ve been interested in clothing and style for decades, in fact since those middle school days, and it’s been an awesome, ever-expanding ride. Obviously, at first that interest was very one-dimensional, limited both by the information available at the time and the typical scope of a 13- year old boy’s mind, in that it consisted only of an obsessive focus on two brands, the ones all the “cool kids” seemed to wear:
Nike and Tommy Hilfiger.
Both made clothing that was way out of the price range of a middle schooler (though I suppose, at that age, isn’t everything?), but a 50-ish dollar bottle of cologne I could definitely swing with some chores and birthday money, and swing I did, from Foley’s, in a gift set with an after-shave (ha!).
The deeper you get into style, the more you realize it exists on two different levels. The first level is of course the clothes and accessories themselves, and part of the fun - and frustration - is that as soon as you think you have a handle on everything that’s out there, you realize you know pretty much nothing at all. The second level is that every item carries with it multiple levels of significance, notably how it came to be, who sells it now and how they sell it, and of course what wearing it says about you; exploring this second level is far more difficult and fraught than trying to catalog every release of the Jordan 1, which leads me to this article.
When I first sat down to write this piece I thought it would be relatively straightforward, just a story about something from my childhood that still fills me with great memories. It didn’t take long for all the knowledge I’ve acquired since then to kick in and make me realize that there might be far more to the “Real American Fragrance” than just the juice in the bottle.
Tommy Hilfiger the brand was an icon of the 90’s
Before I continue with my personal attachment to Tommy, the fragrance, it’s worth stepping back and considering just how much of a big deal Tommy Hilfiger, the brand, was when the former was released in 1995 (a few years back I put together a podcast episode on just this topic, please do check it out if you want more details).
Tommy Hilfiger started his eponymous company in the 1980’s, with his first big “splash” resulting from an (in)famous - some might have said insolent at the time - billboard campaign in New York’s Times Square, in which he put himself among several, well-established greats of American menswear.
Things really took off from a broader-culture perspective when Snoop Doggy Dogg (now Snoop Dogg) wore a Tommy Hilfiger rugby shirt while performing on an episode of Saturday Night Live. There’s a risk here of going way off topic, but I think we have to talk about fashion’s rather duplicitous relationship with hip-hop at the time, which is especially relevant in the context of Tommy Hilfiger (I’m by no means a hip-hop expert so if I’ve left anything out or been mistaken, please do let me know in the comments!).
In the 1990’s, rap and hip-hop were still in their infancy but it was clear that these were the ascendant cultural forces, whose dominance continues to this day. The stars of the genre gravitated to - and propelled - brands such as Ralph Lauren, Nautica and of course Tommy Hilfiger, who had until that point based their outreach efforts on images of WASP-y types frolicking around lighthouses.
As a result, while these brands were presumably happy to receive the boost in exposure and revenues, they were hesitant (to the point of seeming refusal) to embrace these stars back for fear of pushing away what they thought was their core demographic (I’ve mentioned this before, but check out this excellent documentary from Complex on Ralph Lauren’s relationship with hip- hop).
If that last paragraph reads as really gross, it’s because it is, and in the case of Tommy Hilfiger, the man, this led to rumors that pretty much any teen from the 1990’s can easily recall. To be fair to Tommy Hilfiger, again the person, my understanding is that a) this never happened, b) going back to his first venture (“The People’s Place”) music was always very important to him, and c) this low-key awareness of hip-hop and R&B did eventually turn into what I would qualify as an enthusiastic embrace, which peaked here and you will never convince me otherwise:
Aaliyah and Tommy Hilfiger, two icons at the top of their game in the 90s (Image source: unable to access).
Yes, this was a hell of a detour, but I bring all this up because you can’t discuss Tommy the fragrance without putting it into the context of Tommy Hilfiger the company. In turn, you cannot separate the brand from the 1990s and the trends which it (and other companies) simultaneously used and kept away.
Not quite as iconic as the picture of Aaliyah wearing Tommy Hilfiger, but still…pretty damn iconic (Image source: Twitter).
Nowhere is that contradiction more clear, in my opinion, than the marketing for Tommy the fragrance.
Tommy is an icon, but for whom exactly?
Going back to my earlier comments on how fragrances fit into a brand’s portfolio, while it may be true they can provide a cheaper point-of-entry than its other products, it is NOT true that brands can manage that category half-heartedly as a result.
Selling fragrances strategically is double-edged: do well and lure in customers who may one day graduate to more expensive items - I certainly asked for a lot of Tommy Hilfiger clothing for late 90’s birthdays - but do poorly and you risk tarnishing the brand badly in the eyes of both prospective and current customers. More practically, it’s worth mentioning that profit margins on fragrances are generally massive, so the financial incentive is certainly there to do them well.
The Tommy fragrance team, and presumably Tommy Hilfiger himself, took the assignment seriously and swung for the fences by hiring fragrance legend Alberto Morillas (partnered up with Annie Buzantian) of Acqua Di Gio fame, and provided an interesting, joyful but perhaps also controversial, brief: put together a fragrance that captures the best of different parts of the United States. Think mint from one part, lavender from another, and so forth.
I don’t know what came first, the tagline - “The Real American Fragrance” - or the brief, but either way it’s certainly in-line with the “All-American” imagery that the brand was leaning into heavily at the time Tommy was released.
Before I cover the official tagline, I have to talk about the phrase “All-American”, which is my choice to use here but is well known in the US, and I suspect would be used by others if you asked them to come up with a description of Tommy Hilfiger (the brand)’s ad campaigns at the time.
As much as I hate to think about it, the mid-90’s were a very long time ago so I’m writing this with lots of hindsight, but in 2022 it’s not as clear that the term “All-American” can be used to evoke images and emotions just like those in the Tommy fragrance ad below, without quickly becoming problematic.
The “Wario World” to Tommy Hilfiger’s colorful Mushroom Kingdom is found in the black-and-white pages of Abercrombie & Fitch’s A&F Quarterly, a brand that got into trouble it’s still recovering from by trying to define very strictly what “All-American” meant and then excluding those who did not fit that definition.
Ad from the 1990’s for Tommy by Tommy Hilfiger. It’s fun seeing faces that became famous elsewhere…(Image source: www.haw-lin.com)
At first, it seems like the official tagline veers into this direction. Certainly, times were different in 1995, but “Real American” is a HELL of a loaded term in 2022, and to the extent that none of today’s issues appeared overnight, surely this must have caused some pause back then?
I realize that it’s unfair to expect people from nearly 30 years ago to have today’s values, that’s just the nature of progress. But even back then, using this type of language against the “All-American” staging of the ad is to me still a ballsy move.
At best it just comes across as really presumptuous. I mean, Polo Green is an iconic American fragrance in its own right and had been out for a very long time prior to Tommy (then again I suppose this makes sense in the context of that Times Square billboard).
At worst it only served to highlight the “relationship” Tommy Hilfiger the brand had - or didn’t - with certain consumers.
Is this a fragrance for “Real Americans”? If so, who are these “Real Americans”?
Or, is this referring to a fragrance that best captures the smell of the United States? If so, by whose definition was the smell of “Real America” actually formulated?
I was not tying these questions to Tommy 25 years ago, but I was absolutely aware of them, if only abstractly because…
Punchline-time…
In 1997 when I finally got my hands on a bottle, I’d been in the US for 7 years but I was not (and still am not) an American citizen, so I was definitely NOT a Real American!
As a 13-year old though, I certainly tried to be, and all this imagery really had an effect on me. The kids I saw wearing Tommy Hilfiger clothing were American, and they were cool. My reasoning was if I could just wear some of this cologne, I could be that kind of cool also.
It didn’t hurt that the actual fragrance was - and still is - pretty damn good.
Tommy is a special scent, technical drawbacks notwithstanding
Trying to describe a fragrance based on note-breakdown is always very difficult because there are several factors at play which end up being highly personal, such as how sensitive your nose is and how your body chemistry reacts with a given fragrance.
If it helps and somehow you’ve never smelled Tommy before, do check out the note breakdown on Fragrantica. The mint note in particular always seems to get mentioned with regards to Tommy, and for what it’s worth that note in the opening is absolutely what sticks out the most for me, funnily enough smelling like a (non-Ralph Lauren) Polo mint.
For people who came of age in the mid-1990’s (especially in America though perhaps elsewhere also, please let me know in the comments), Tommy is one of those smells that is so instantly recognizable that even if you think you’ve forgotten what is smells like, as soon as you get a nose-ful you think "ohhh yeeeaa now I remember” and instantly every dance/awkward date/mall hangout you ever went to with this on comes flooding back into your brain.
To me, that’s a testament to the work of Morillas and Buzantian, because only scents which are singular can conjure up such strong memories, and Tommy is certainly unique. I can’t say that this smells like “America in a bottle”, but I can say that I had never smelled anything like this at the time, and I have never smelled anything like it since.
To my subjective tastes this is a win, but from a more objective, technical point of view there are a few shortcomings. Neither the longevity nor the projection are class-leading, and some will complain about the quality of the components, but this is destined for the mass-market so that’s par for the course. The most disappointing aspect of Tommy, to me, is how “thin” this smells compared to other colognes, even from that time (I use “cologne” generally here, this is an eau de toilette).
For instance, my father wore Armani Eau Pour Homme constantly and I still wear this today. Both are eaux de toilette, yet the Armani just smells so much richer than Tommy. Is this because the younger audience to which Tommy was targeted did not have my dad’s disposable income? Or perhaps, because it was targeted at a younger audience, the noses behind Tommy felt they would be too young to fully appreciate the deeper levels of nuance you get with more “advanced” smells, and so didn’t even bother?
I understand the potential reasons, but the smell is so good that it’s hard not to dream of an alternate universe where Tommy exists as an elixir-type concentration.
That is of course a pipe-dream, so whether or not Tommy’s flaws in its current form are deal-breakers for you depends heavily on whether you would be inclined to buy this today, and with something as evocative as Tommy, that’s a difficult question to address.
How were your middle and high school experiences?
“It smells dated” is a phrase you hear a lot in the fragrance community when it discusses colognes from the past, and I have certainly heard it applied to Tommy.
Is that fair?
On one hand, certain things - clothes, music, movies - are considered “dated” because they were absolutely a product of their time; you can’t think of bell bottoms without also seeing disco balls.
On the other hand, colognes stand apart because memories are so strongly associated to scent, and my view is that some colognes are seen as “dated” not because they couldn’t stand on their own today, but rather because wearers associate them so strongly with memories from long ago.
I brought up Abercrombie & Fitch earlier, so let’s talk “Fierce”. Setting aside the company’s issues, no one who knows colognes thinks they half-assed Fierce. That fragrance is infamous because it was sprayed everywhere, sure, but it is iconic because it was absolutely a unique fragrance that teens bought in droves, and which still stands out today.
In fact, in that same alternate universe where Tommy Elixir exists, Montblanc Legend was actually the first to introduce the Fierce DNA, and in that universe, I’m fairly certain the feelings that extra-dimensional adults have for Fierce presently are not what I and my friends feel.
While Fierce still smells different from anything else, it is impossible - impossible - for anyone who grew up in the US when I did to separate Fierce from not only Abercrombie & Fitch, but also their own middle and high school days, which for many are better off forgotten.
I use this extreme example because I think Tommy shares a similar head (nose?) space, if perhaps not quite as markedly. Whereas many consumers are still very much aware that Abercrombie & Fitch did some shady things, I can’t imagine that many Gen Z-ers are aware of the rumors around Tommy Hilfiger.
That said, if you are my age, smelling Tommy will absolutely bring many memories back, some of which you may wish had stayed buried, and that’s important in considering whether or not you want to have this in your collection.
As for me, I did purchase a new bottle about two years ago (and two flanker-ish fragrances from Tommy Hilfiger), though I haven’t used it that much. For fun I will spray it on occasionally, and it is comforting to put my nose to the atomizer on days when a whiff will do, but I can’t say it’s anywhere near a go-to. Still, I would be sad if I found out one day it were discontinued and I couldn’t experience it anymore, so hopefully I always have at least a few drops lying around somewhere for when I need an American flavor/scent of Proustianism.
This is the bottle I bought myself a couple of years ago. It’s still instantly recognizable, though I wish they had kept the old cardboard box, which was originally a giant flag logo.
If you’re Gen-Z and don’t mind considering some advice from an old guy, I would recommend you check this one out. This is a fragrance that won’t break the bank, and to the extent that it is still unique, it will stand out on its own merits when you’re around your peers (who may compliment you rather than judging you for trying too hard to be young…).
Let’s be honest, Tommy is NOT the Real American Fragrance.
But you know what?
No matter how much I try to read into it today, Tommy is an icon and for me, the starting point of a journey that I’m still on. Over two decades ago I could only dream of wearing a wardrobe full of flag logos, and for a middle school kid with very limited money, that iconic-looking bottle of cologne was a small step I could realistically take.
It’s been a long time since I’ve cared for those logos, but Tommy still holds a special place in my life.
If that wasn’t enough of a positive note to end on, check out this commercial from 1997 for Tommy. This is the odd fragrance commercial that stands out in that it actually has something to say, rather than being some fever-dream of “luxurious” randomness featuring a celebrity you may or may not have seen on-screen in the past decade.
I’ve transcribed the narration, which was presumably read by Tommy Hilfiger himself, and I defy you not to feel the tiniest hint of something as you listen to it.
Yes, this is just marketing copy and in 1997, yes, this was just a fragrance commercial.
Times have changed and in the hellscape of 2022 this narration sounds borderline delusional, but Tommy makes me - and probably many others - happy because it takes us back to a time when it didn’t sound quite so absurd.
Perhaps, if you didn’t think about it too hard, it might even have sounded true.
“There’s so much in this country,
it belongs to everyone.
No matter how different we are,
we all have something in common.
There’s a thread,
that weaves us all together.
It’s me,
it’s you,
it’s Tommy.”
Ad from 1997 for Tommy by Tommy Hilfiger.