THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 67
ties that Clemens is happy to avoid, like
negotiating with corporate sponsors and
talking about politics. Radboy is a high-
concept sort of person. That day, he was
contemplating how an idea he’d had for
a magazine called Radical Parenting
could be integrated into the Spring 2020
runway show.
“Is that a real magazine?” Clemens
asked, only half paying attention.
“No,” Radboy said. “It’s the idea that
every day you reproduce your life.”
“Uh-huh,” Clemens said. “I mean...
I get the idea of being pregnant with
yourself.”
“You’re like a newspaper,” Radboy
explained. “Every day, you have the new
edition, and it’s the same as the last one,
and it reiterates everything that’s true
about the world and your own body,
even if you don’t want it to be true.”
“Wow,” Clemens said.
Like many indie fashion labels, Tel-
far uses marketing arrangements with
larger companies to help fund its run-
way shows. On a laptop, Clemens and
Radboy looked over the first images of
a collaboration with Converse. A T-shirt
was printed with the image of a basket-
ball player posing like a ballerina in a
pair of Telfar shorts, an example of what
Clemens calls “get the look”—relatively
affordable T-shirts printed with graph-
ics of people wearing more expensive
Telfar clothes.
Clemens often dresses friends for
performances, and friends often work
in exchange for clothes. One weekend,
the R. & B. singer Kelsey Lu, who was
preparing to perform at Afropunk, the
annual black-music festival in Brook-
lyn, dropped by, carrying a large Tel-
far bag in fire-engine red. She wore
her hair in thick red plaits, and her
eyebrows were painted electric blue.
Clemens embraced her and led her to a
clothing rack.
“Pretty much everyone is sort of
dressing themselves,” he said, pulling
out a leather jacket and a pair of jeans
with flares made out of gray T-shirt
knit. “I want you to choose things you
actually like.”
He helped her into a one-shouldered
Afro-Jamaican string dress. Lu stood
thoughtfully, sifting through the coat
hangers.
“What’s this?” she asked, holding up
a small beige rectangle on a hanger.
“It’s a knee brace,” Clemens said. “It’s
a knee-brace bag.” The knee brace had
its own tiny cargo pocket.R
adboy often talks about the differ-
ence between “representation” and
“presence”—between, say, a white-owned
label paying a black artist to pose in its
clothes and to post the image on Insta-
gram, and Clemens dressing his friends
for a party that he films and puts on-
line. The distinction matters at a time
when the fashion industry is proclaim-
ing new ethical standards. Clemens has
noticed that press about Telfar often
uses words like “diversity,” “community,”
and “inclusive.” “I’m, like, always being
included,” Clemens said, dryly.
In the past three years, Telfar’s run-
way shows have become mini-festivals
featuring a certain kind of New York
indie celebrity, such as the singers Kelela
and Dev Hynes; Harris, the playwright;
and the performance artists Wu Tsang
and boychild. “I feel like Telfar circulates
around a lot of—I hate to say it, but,
‘black excellence,’” the writer, artist, and
experimental chef Precious Okoyomon
told me. Okoyomon recently cooked
for a Telfar dinner at Mission Chinese
Food, whose chef, Danny Bowien, is
also a friend of Clemens’s. Clemens
made clear that his collaborators are not
typical “brand ambassadors,” in the way
that Jennifer Lawrence is a “face” of
Dior. Harris said, “Something that they
do a lot with their productions is just
let everyone jam.” For the Fall/Winter
2019 collection, called “Country,” which
was designed around the tropes of cow-
boys and country music, models crowd-
surfed in a mosh pit at Irving Plaza. “You
can’t get insurance for that,” Clemens
said, proudly.
For Paris Fashion Week, the Telfar
team decided to make one of its most
ambitious projects to date—what Rad-
boy called a “multi-director” film. In
the film, a traveller, played by Sanders,
confronts a hostile security bureaucracy.
Harris, the poet and d.j. Juliana Hux-
table, and the visual artist Diamond
Stingily would contribute scripts, along
with the filmmaker Clayton Vomero,
whom Radboy had hired to direct.
“We’re working with a group of friends
that I’ve known for over ten years,”
Clemens explained. “Their takes on
whatever we want to do will be whatwe want. Their eyes are like our eyes.”
A few weeks later, on the first day
of the film shoot, Clemens crammed
into a white van with his makeup art-
ists, his hair stylists, a studio manager,
several models, a rapper, and a singer,
and they headed to Staten Island. Shawn
Mendes and Camila Cabello’s “Señor-
ita” played on the van’s radio. Oyinda,
a British-Nigerian pop singer who often
models for Telfar, hummed along.
“I love the radio,” Clemens said, scroll-
ing on his phone. “I listen to every sta-
tion.” He tries to catch the daily roundup
of new music on Hot 97 at two o’clock.
“I listen to 105.1. I listen to Z100 early
in the morning,” he said.
“That’s your vibe?” one model asked.
“Every vibe’s my vibe,” he said. The
van crossed the Verrazzano-Narrows
Bridge. “Staten Island is cute,” Clem-
ens happily observed. They pulled up
to a marina full of tugboats called Mil-
ler’s Launch, and everyone erupted
in excitement.
“Whoaaaaaa, look at this!”
“Cuuuute!”
On a landing near the water, a group
of five models in Telfar cargo-wear were
rehearsing a dance, marching in place.
The dance had been inspired by the
poet Aimé Césaire’s “Notebook of a Re-
turn to the Native Land” and was cho-
reographed by one of Clemens’s friends,
Xavier Cha. Pregnant and dressed in a
halter top and black motocross pants,
Cha stood by the models, counting out
the moves.
Gallagher, who is small and straight-
backed, with long dark hair, wore a long
denim skirt, a life jacket, and clogs. She
was busy making sure that the models
were wearing the right jewelry. The
models skipped rocks as they waited to
be ferried out to a barge, while Clem-
ens and his crew worked from another
boat that had been set up as a staging
area. When the R. & B. artist Ian Isiah
reached the barge, he belted out a song,
his white outfit and long hair blowing
in the breeze. “Ian is very ‘Share My
World’ right now,” Clemens said, find-
ing the perfect visual reference in the
1997 Mary J. Blige album.
Vomero and his crew seemed disori-
ented by the casual spontaneity of Clem-
ens and his team. During the next shoot,
at Oakwood Beach, Clemens checked
his hair in the reflection of someone’s