A Tommy Hilfiger runway review.

There is something very comforting about Tommy Hilfiger.

The rugby shirt. The blazer. The pleated skirt. The loafers. The baseball cap. The slightly ridiculous idea that you might, at any moment, be expected to attend a yacht club meeting.

You know the clothes.

You probably owned some version of them. Or your brother did. Or your father. Or that boy at school who somehow looked annoyingly good in a rugby shirt while the rest of us looked like we were going to PE.

And this collection doesn’t really try to escape any of that.

Instead, it makes everything a little too big.

The rugby shirts become dresses. The blazers swallow the shoulders. The sleeves disappear over the hands. Pleated shorts get wider, skirts get swingier, trousers get roomier and suddenly the whole thing starts to feel like you’ve gone into somebody else’s wardrobe and decided, yes, this will do.

Which, actually, is a pretty good idea.

American prep, borrowed.

I like that.

Because there is something much more interesting about clothes that look inherited than clothes that look perfectly assembled. The slightly wrong blazer. The sweater that’s too big. The shorts that seem to belong to somebody six inches taller than you.

It makes the clothes feel lived in.

And that seems to be what Tommy is playing with here — not reinvention exactly, but the feeling of having grown into a wardrobe without ever quite growing out of it.

The baseball caps and bucket hats are everywhere, which initially feels almost excessive, until you realise they are doing a very useful job. Everybody starts looking like they’re part of the same slightly chaotic school trip.

Nobody is the star.

Everyone is on the team.

There are utility jackets too, repeated in khaki, red and forest green, and I understand why they keep coming back. They’re basically the collection’s uniform inside the uniform.

Although at some point I did start thinking…

Okay, we get it.

There is a jacket.

We have seen the jacket.

The colour changes.

The jacket remains.

But repetition can be useful when it creates a sense of belonging, and that’s really what the collection is doing. It doesn’t want every look to feel like a separate personality. It wants the whole cast to look as though they’ve all arrived from the same strange American summer camp.

The shoes help with that.

Loafers, platform sneakers, sandals with socks, sandals without socks. Campus, beach club, boat deck, slightly hungover walk home.

The wardrobe is supposed to work everywhere.

And most of the time it does.

Although some combinations feel less like deliberately wrong and more like somebody got dressed in the dark.

Which is not always a bad thing.

I’m beginning to think fashion has become so obsessed with looking intentional that I actually enjoy seeing something that hasn’t completely made up its mind.

The colour palette is classic Tommy at first — navy, cream, red — and then it starts wandering.

Forest green. Mustard. Burgundy. Powder blue. Peach.

The powder blue and emerald combination in particular keeps returning, and it’s surprisingly beautiful. There is something very fresh about it, especially against all the navy and cream.

Then there are the checks.

Tartan, gingham, windowpane.

Because apparently one type of checked fabric wasn’t enough.

And then, right in the middle of all this very recognisable American prep, something rather stranger appears.

The satin slip dresses.

They feel almost like they’ve wandered in from another collection.

And then I looked closer.

The fabric is covered in enlarged, faded-looking fragments of vintage Tommy packaging and old flag graphics, as though somebody had taken the brand’s 1980s and ’90s visual history, put it through a photocopier about twelve times and then turned the result into a dress.

That, to me, is the most interesting idea in the collection.

Because suddenly the nostalgia isn’t just in the clothes.

It’s in the evidence of the clothes.

The old logos. The packaging. The slightly faded graphics. The feeling of finding something in the back of a wardrobe that you haven’t seen for twenty years.

And that’s much more interesting than simply bringing back an old Tommy Hilfiger piece and making it look new again.

The collection does, however, have a bit of a problem with its own formula.

There are only so many oversized rugby shirts, pleated bottoms and baseball caps you can look at before you start feeling like you’ve accidentally enrolled in a very fashionable boarding school.

The strongest looks are the ones where the oversized proportions actually change the way the clothes feel — a rugby polo becoming a dress, a huge blazer making something underneath suddenly feel smaller, a pleated skirt becoming almost architectural because of the amount of fabric around it.

That’s when the idea works.

When it’s simply big blazer + pleated bottom + hat, it starts to feel more like inventory.

And I don’t want inventory.

I want somebody to have made a slightly questionable decision and then somehow made it brilliant.

That’s what the collection is at its best.

Because there is a strange tension underneath all this preppy familiarity.

How long can you keep something youthful by refusing to let it grow up?

The clothes are oversized. The styling is relaxed. The hats are slightly ridiculous. The socks are showing. The tailoring doesn’t behave itself.

It’s almost as though Tommy Hilfiger has decided that American prep should remain permanently seventeen.

And honestly…

Maybe that’s the fantasy.

We spend so much time trying to look older, more sophisticated, more expensive, more together.

There is something nice about clothes that seem to say: I borrowed this. I don’t know whose it is. I’m keeping it.

And perhaps that is where Tommy still works best.

Not when it tries to invent a new language, because I’m not sure that’s really what this house needs.

But when it takes things we already know — the blazer, the rugby shirt, the pleated skirt, the cap — and makes them feel slightly unfamiliar again.

A little bigger.

A little messier.

A little less grown up.

The question is whether borrowed eventually starts looking unfinished.

I don’t think this collection answers that.

But I’m not sure I want it to.

Sometimes clothes that don’t quite fit are the ones you end up wearing the most.