people I saw carrying them: a man with
a flattop haircut on the train draped in
an Eileen Fisher-esque assemblage of
a wool poncho and scarf, with a tan Tel-
far bag and dark painted nails; a tall,
thin man with short platinum hair wear-
ing a red tartan dress and white plat-
form sneakers, holding a tiny white Tel-
far bag and dancing at the back of the
neighborhood bar Rebecca’s. On In-
stagram, people post images of them-
selves with their Telfar bags from Paris,
Seoul, and Montgomery, Alabama. Rad-
boy described the committed Telfar cus-
tomer as a “black-adjacent, queer-adja-
cent” person who, until recently, was not
often found in fashion advertising. Gal-
lagher said, “We’re making clothes, but
I think we’re aware that we’re trying to
represent our people and our friends.”
One day, the person I spotted wear-
ing a Telfar bag was Clemens, pointing
at me and winking over the shoulder of
a drag queen he was hugging at a ware-
house party near a Superfund site in
Ridgewood, Queens. It was 7 a.m. on
Labor Day, and he was coming off a d.j.
gig. He was shirtless and wearing dark,
flared Telfar jeans, Telfar jewelry, and a
large lemon-yellow edition of his name-
sake bag, worn across his body. Clemens
describes himself as a “really outgoing
loner,” and his friends respect the odd
hours he likes to keep. “You can never
get Telfar to go to dinner, because he’s
asleep between 5 P.M. and 8 P.M.,” the
artist Khalid al Gharaballi, Clemens’s
friend and former roommate, told me.
In conversation, Clemens has a ten-
dency to drop a particular kind of visual
reference—to, say, the way a woman dips
her nails in a glass of champagne in
“Showgirls,” one of his favorite movies,
or to the ballet flats that female office
workers wear during the summer. (In
2013, he made a unisex version.) In their
photo shoots, he, Gallagher, and Rad-
boy like to comment on fashion’s his-
tory of whitewashing and cultural ap-
propriation. They have photographed
their tattooed friends in cuddle piles,
mocking the prep-school sexuality of
Bruce Weber’s Abercrombie & Fitch
catalogues from the nineties, and, in a
play on Ralph Lauren’s long history of
finding “inspiration” in Native Ameri-
can craftsmanship, they have put a Tel-
far logo in a dream catcher. A series of
Instagram videos last fall to promote
Telfar’s jewelry line satirized Dockers
ads from the late eighties. In the older
ads, a group of mostly white banker types
sat around discussing golf. In Telfar’s
version, friends talk about astrology.
At last year’s Met Gala, where the
theme was camp, Clemens dressed Ash-ton Sanders, an actor from “Moonlight,”
in a faded-black jersey tailcoat paired
with breeches, a cravat, and white lace
stockings. Clemens, whose hair was in
a prom updo with tendrils framing his
face, wore a garment that looked split
down the middle, like a unisex-bath-
room graphic come to life: a suit, made
out of white jersey and printed with the
words “Telfar 2020” in college-athletics
font, worn with a one-shouldered black
silk slip dress that had a hint of the mall
about it. “Taking these things that peo-
ple are used to wearing and recontex-
tualizing them for a new person and a
new time is what makes a lot of the
stuff ‘me,’” he said.
Radboy, a small, bearded man with
round, wire-framed glasses, showed me
a recent photo spread that Gallagher
had styled for Garage magazine. (Rad-
boy and Gallagher are a couple and have
a five-year-old son.) In the photographs,
by Roe Ethridge, Clemens and the play-
wright Jeremy O. Harris, a regular col-
laborator, pose for a formal portrait in
coördinated knit polos and lounge naked
on white couches under the chandeliers
at the Belvedere, the clothing-optional
men’s resort in Cherry Grove. The im-
ages looked both familiar and not. A
seventies porn shoot about two men in
love on a military base? A Life profile
of a U.N. diplomat?
“A lot of the images and things that
we do are about visualizing a different
world,” Radboy said. “A lot of the im-
ages don’t seem to take place today.”
“But they will,” Clemens said.
“Not in the past and not in the fu-
ture,” Radboy said.
“But maybe tomorrow?” Clemens
said. “Like, after you see it, you start act-
ing like it a little bit.”
Radboy went on, “We’re literally some-
times thinking, What person doesn’t exist?
And then, like, a month later, on Insta-
gram, that person exists.”
In addition to working for Telfar,
Radboy, the son of Iranian immigrants,
is the art director for Bidoun, an arts
magazine about the Middle East and
its diasporas. He is also, with Gallagher,
a founding member of Shanzhai Bien-
nial, a conceptual-art collective that once
described itself as a “multinational brand
posing as an art-project posing as a mul-
tinational brand posing as a biennial.”
At Telfar, Radboy has taken on the du-