Camila Cabello spends the most arresting seconds of her new Tommy Hilfiger campaign submerged in cold water, dressed head to toe in the house’s signature red, singing a Queen anthem about the urge to break loose. Directed by Gordon von Steiner and unveiled from Amsterdam on September 15, that image anchors Freedom Eau de Parfum, the American brand’s first new prestige women’s fragrance in more than a decade and the reason Cabello now holds the title of Global Ambassador. It is a considerable bet, and the brand is not pretending otherwise, framing the launch as the opening of a new chapter for a fragrance business it has spent years quietly rebuilding.
The scent itself moves the label somewhere it has never been. Freedom introduces what Tommy Hilfiger calls Clean Amber, a warmer, more enveloping register than the crisp, all-American freshness that made Tommy and Tommy Girl fixtures for over thirty years. Master Perfumer Honorine Blanc and Perfumer Alexandra Monet built the composition around a bright opening of lychee and dewy florals, a heart of magnolia blossom, and a base of blue vanilla that keeps the whole thing from tipping into anything cloying. The bottle reads as pure archive: a heavy glass base, a triangular footprint, ribbed detailing, and a red monogrammed cap lifted straight from the brand’s design codes.
The name carries its own history. Longtime fragrance devotees will recognize Freedom as a revival of the franchise Tommy Hilfiger first introduced in 1999 with Freedom for Him and Freedom for Her, scents long since discontinued. Reaching back for it is a deliberate move by Give Back Beauty, the Swiss licensor that has run the brand’s fragrance portfolio since 2022 and reported double-digit category growth every year since. Freedom now joins a lineup that still leans on those decades-old icons, arriving at a moment when heritage houses across beauty are mining their own back catalogs for names that already carry emotional weight.
For Cabello, the appointment reads as a natural extension of a career increasingly lived across fashion and beauty rather than only in the studio. “I’ve always found Tommy Hilfiger to be classic and timeless,” she said of the partnership, describing a campaign that “celebrates expressing yourself authentically and living completely in the moment.” She framed the fit in terms of individuality, calling it something that feels “honest, effortless and real.” The brand returned the sentiment through founder Tommy Hilfiger, who said he “couldn’t imagine a better ambassador to introduce this new chapter,” crediting her ability to connect through music, authenticity and warmth.
The music is where the campaign earns its concept. Rather than imitate Freddie Mercury, Cabello recorded a deliberately restrained take on Queen’s 1984 track, describing the choice with characteristic frankness. She wanted, she has said, to deliver “a softer, almost more introspective version of that song,” the Camila version rather than a tribute. The theme of freedom turns out to be personal, too. Speaking about the shoot, which had her running through genuinely freezing water for the sake of the image, she described feeling most free “when I’m in water, and when I’m more in my body than in my head,” a line that lands closer to wellness confession than ad copy.
That blurring of scent, pop stardom and self-help fluency is exactly what makes the launch feel current. Tommy Hilfiger has courted musicians before, from Beyoncé to Enrique Iglesias in the early 2000s, but Cabello arrives when a fragrance is expected to sell a mood and a mindset as much as a smell. She lands the campaign while at work on her fifth solo album, and Hilfiger, for his part, has been candid about the long road here: “It took a while to figure out exactly what we wanted to launch,” he admitted, “but we landed on something really strong.” Freedom Eau de Parfum is available now at tommy.com, priced at $99 for the 100ml bottle, with 50ml, 30ml and 10ml sizes rounding out the range.
