Tommy Hilfiger was sent home from school for wearing flares

30 August 2017

Tommy Hilfiger was sent home from school for wearing flared trousers when he was younger.

Tommy Hilfiger

The 66-year-old fashion designer - who founded his eponymous brand in 1985 - has admitted he has always had an interest in fashion and when he realised his music and reading ability were not his strong points he decided to gain credibility for his sense of style, which only saw him dismissed from school for the day to change into "normal clothes".

Speaking to the Telegraph newspaper, the creative mastermind said: "My music skills turned out to be as bad as my reading skills. So i decided to look the part. I grew my hair long and wore bell-bottoms to school. My high school principal sent me home and told me to put normal clothes on and come back."

However, the American mogul has since toned down his wardrobe choices and will stick to a classic chinos and shirt ensemble.

When asked about his go-to outfit, he said: "Chinos and button down shirts."

Although his head teacher didn't approve of his statement outfits in class his friends did, which inspired him to set up his own "small shop" named People's Place.

He explained: "A lot of my friends wanted to dress like me, so I decided to open a small shop. I was working nights at a gas station and i had saved $150, and a friend had another $150, so together we bought 20 pairs of jeans and sold them out of a car, then we opened a shop. People's Place. It ran for ten years."

And it was during that decade when he ran his business that Tommy received the "best education" about designing, as he would listen into his customer's conversations with one another, which helped him to understand the needs of his buyers.

He explained: "I was in the fitting room, listening to the comments, on fit, fabric, feel. Knowing what a customer likes, what they don't like, what they would never buy, what everyone wanted to buy. That's the best education in the world, because you learn to listen to the consumer, and the consumer is the boss. They will decide whether or not you are successful."