64 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
THEWORLD OFFASHION
GET THE LOOK
Telfar Clemens takes inspiration from mass appeal.
BY EMILYWITT
L
ast summer, the fashion designer
Telfar Clemens was thinking
about cargo. In July, his label, Tel-
far, moved its studio from a warehouse
in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bush-
wick to four shipping containers down
the street. The containers were stacked
across from a corrugated-metal quonset
hut in a gravel yard that recalled a land-
ing-strip airport in a tropical country,
exposed to the elements and easily dis-
mantled in an exodus. As Clemens de-
signed his Spring 2020 collection, he was
considering the cargo economy. Global-
ization has produced a lingua franca of
T-shirts and jeans, sweats and tracksuits,
polo shirts and basketball shorts. These
everyday garments are the ones Clemens
has returned to most often in his designs.
The label’s clothes are standardized forms
that seem to have undergone a process
of estrangement. They’re sold under the
slogan “Not for You, for Everyone.”
I visited Clemens one afternoon last
July in the red Hyundai shipping con-
tainer that he was using as an office. He
is thirty-five, lanky, and graceful, with a
gap-toothed grin and a smoky laugh.
That day, he was wearing a net tank top
with Rastafarian stripes from the dollar
store, Telfar knee-length denim shorts,
a gold Telfar-logo necklace, and black
Converse sneakers. For the Spring 2020
collection, Clemens was crossing the
Atlantic to show in Paris for the first
time. He and Avena Gallagher, Telfar’s
longtime stylist, had decided to play
with an archetype, that of the newly
arrived immigrant naïf known in the
West African diaspora as a Johnny Just
Come. Clemens called it “you’ve-just-
come-to-this-country kind of styling”:
new and secondhand clothes combined
in slightly the wrong way. On a board
were photographs of Clemens wearing
various iterations of the look: a starched
collar underneath a hoodie, running
shorts over fishnets, track pants paired
with a blazer. The collection had a lot
of cargo pockets. Some were in the con-
ventional places, on pants and vests; oth-
ers were affixed to the sleeves of T-shirts
or along waistbands.
Clemens was born in Queens, to Li-
berian parents. He started his brand as
an undergraduate at Pace University, in
- At the time, many of his friends
dressed in ways that crossed gender lines,
and, a decade before Gucci, Balenciaga,
and Tom Ford had coed runway shows,
Telfar’s clothes were marketed as unisex.
The label was as much an art practice as
it was a clothing company, and, for many
years, Telfar was worn primarily by a small,
knowing cohort of people, the types who
frequented the roving New York party
GHE20G0TH1K and read the online arts-
and-Internet-culture magazine DIS.
Clemens has always biked around
New York, and many of the ideas for his
designs have come from glimpses of pe-
destrians: a tank top tailored to look like
it has fallen off one shoulder; “drop-waist
jeans” that mimic boxers peeking above
sagging pants. Clemens’s work often
pays subtle homage to street retail, with
its gold chains pinned in lines on red
velveteen cushions and sundresses on
headless Styrofoam mannequins. Re-
cently, on a trip to Florence, Italy, he
noticed that ubiquitous puffer jackets,
seen against the city’s medieval archi-
tecture, resembled suits of armor. The
ruched costumes in Italian Renaissance
paintings reminded him of the braided
T-shirts sold in beach towns. The re-
sulting collection, a Telfar press release
said, was “like a drunk Medici daughter
on spring break in Ocean City, Maryland.”
The sole owner of his label, Clem-
ens admires designers like Jean Paul
Gaultier, who put men in skirt suits and
borrowed from the uniforms of waiters
and sailors, and Vivienne Westwood,
whose relationship to London’s punk
scene bears some resemblance to Cle-
mens’s ties to New York night life. But
he is just as influenced by Macy’s and
Marshalls. “I want to be Michael Kors,
but on purpose,” he has said. Gallagher
noted that Clemens often refers to his
aunt’s Talbots catalogues: “He has al-
ways been super interested in what ev-
erybody wears rather than what the rare
person wears.”
In 2017, Clemens was the recipient
of the C.F.D.A./Vogue Fashion Fund
award. He invested much of the prize,
four hundred thousand dollars, in the
production of the Telfar Shopping Bag,
which comes in three sizes, and is mod-
elled on the dimensions of Blooming-
dale’s shopping bags. It became the la-
bel’s best-selling item, and has jokingly
been called the Bushwick Birkin. The
Birkin, a bag made by Hermès, can re-
tail for tens of thousands of dollars. The
smallest Telfar bag can be had for a hun-
dred and fifty dollars. The brand releases
new colors on the first Friday of the
month, when, as Babak Radboy, Telfar’s
artistic director, explained, “people don’t
have to worry about the rent again for
twenty-five days.”
“The label is like the fashion equiv-
alent of a 1970s black punk rock band
from Britain,” Jah X, a New York-based
SoundCloud rapper, who recently re-
leased a track called “Telfar Bag,” told
the magazine Dazed. The Telfar bag
often accompanies a particular school
of street style. Apparently bored with
Minimalism, and too broke or hierarchy-
averse to dress expensively, a generation
raised with access to the entire history
of televisual culture, on YouTube, and to
a bounty of vintage clothes, on eBay,
now specializes in the regeneration of
hyper-specific American phenotypes.
Their outfits are a kind of cross-dressing.
You might see, at a fashion party in New
York City, a man who looks ready to at-
tend a monster-truck rally talking to a
nineties raver chick.
I live in Bushwick, where I notice
Te lfar bags all the time. As I was getting
to know Clemens, I kept a list of the
