Le Tigre Clothing

In this section of the Apparel Search Directory, you will learn about Le Tigre Clothing.

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The above definition about the clothing company Le Tigre Clothing is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. The information source is from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia and was originally obtained from the following page address https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Tigre_(clothing_brand).  The definition has been modified by the Apparel Search Company in June 2009.  The rest of this page and other pages on Apparel Search are NOT under the free document license.

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A Leaping Tiger in the Logo Era

Le Tigre was conceived in 1977 by Bob Rush of Hampton Industries, at the moment when casual sportswear was becoming a logo business. Its product sported the famous leaping tiger logo: a small embroidered animal on a polo shirt or sweatshirt turned a plain garment into a branded one, and shoppers chose between competing chest emblems as a statement of taste and price level. A leaping tiger is a strong mark for that contest — active, easy to recognise at a distance, and different in character from the heraldic or sporting animals used by rival labels, being a predator in motion rather than a posed crest.

Brands built on a single emblem live and die by fashion cycles. When logo sportswear is in demand, the emblem sells the garment almost by itself; when tastes move to plainer clothing, the same range can look dated, and many 1970s and 1980s logo labels faded or disappeared as the cycle turned. The value that remains is recognition: a generation of customers remembers the mark, which is why dormant sportswear names are repeatedly revived rather than replaced by invented new ones.

Relaunch, Licensing and Kenneth Cole Productions

That revival came in 2001, when LT2, a label under Hampton Industries, relaunched Le Tigre. The relaunch expanded upon its sportswear heritage across dual gender lifestyle classifications as well as licensed categories — in trade terms, widening the brand from its earlier base into men's and women's lifestyle clothing, and licensing the tiger into product categories made by other manufacturers under agreement. Licensing suits a logo brand particularly well, because the asset being sold is the emblem itself, and each licensed category advertises the others.

The relaunched brand positions itself as a retro inspired alternative to other logo bearing brands. Retro is the honest pitch for a 1977 mark: rather than compete as a new label, Le Tigre offers the period look knowingly, aimed at buyers who value the vintage reference in a polo or track jacket. In 2007, under the stewardship of Michael DeVirgilio, Le Tigre was purchased by Kenneth Cole Productions, moving the brand from Hampton Industries to a larger New York fashion company with its own retail and licensing operations. The purchase fits the pattern of the page: a heritage emblem created in 1977, a heritage-based relaunch in 2001, and acquisition by a bigger brand owner six years later, with the leaping tiger unchanged throughout.

Logo sportswear also depends on placement. The leaping tiger worked because it sat where buyers look first, on the chest of a knit shirt, and because a leaping animal reads instantly, without letters or explanation, at the distance of a shop display or a tennis court. Emblems of that kind become collectable across generations: a customer who wore the tiger at school age meets it again as a retro design, and the same mark can be sold honestly to both, one as memory and one as vintage style.

Dual gender lifestyle classifications, the phrase used for the relaunched range, describe how such a brand is actually merchandised: not as separate fashion collections, but as one recognisable look carried across men's and women's casual clothing, so a household that buys the label can buy it for everyone. Licensed categories extend the same emblem onto goods the brand owner does not make itself, under quality and design approval, which is how a sportswear name from 1977 could reappear across a modern lifestyle range after 2001 without Hampton Industries having to build factories for every product that carried the tiger.

Acquisition by Kenneth Cole Productions placed Le Tigre inside a company organised around exactly that model — brand ownership, licensing and retail — rather than around factories. For a heritage sportswear mark, that is often the most suitable home: the value sits in recognition and design archives, and a brand owner with licensing infrastructure can put the emblem back into stores and categories faster than a traditional manufacturer rebuilding a range piece by piece. The tiger created in 1977 thus continued as a working commercial asset thirty years on.