68 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
sunglasses, then paddled in circles on a
handmade raft in the water. He was shirt-
less, with a silver-barbell belly-button
piercing. “I like that black sailboat,” Gal-
lagher said, looking out at the water, as
Radboy rearranged pieces of driftwood.
The tide line was littered with plastic
bottles, tampon applicators, pieces of
accordion pipe, plastic cups. Someone
appeared to have done laundry in a
little stream and laid it out
over some rocks to dry. A
Jamaican-American model
named Johan Galaxy, dressed
in a gray Telfar cargo vest and
a blond wig, emerged from a
changing area. “Where’s Tel-
far?” he asked, and then saw
the figure on the raft. Clem-
ens was slowly floating away
toward the horizon. “Oh, my
God, why are y’all letting him
play?” Galaxy said. Production workers
were dispatched to swim the raft back
to shore. When Clemens alighted, he
immediately began inspecting the mod-
els, zipping zippers, tying drawstrings,
tugging at waistbands, folding cuffs.
“Come, come, come,” he beckoned to
Galaxy, and turned him around. “I love
this trashy-ass beach with this outfit.”
C
lemens is on the road for half the
year, overseeing the production of
his collections in Italy and China or vis-
iting showrooms in Paris. When he is
in New York, he lives with an aunt in a
two-bedroom apartment in LeFrak City,
a vast housing complex in Queens whose
buildings were named for different coun-
tries in honor of the 1964 World’s Fair.
Clemens’s aunt moved into the LeFrak
apartment the week he was born, in 1985.
His family spent his first year in New
York, where his father, Major, got a mas-
ter’s degree at Pace. Then they returned
to Liberia, where his mother, Hawa, and
Major worked as civil servants. In 1990,
civil war compelled the family to move
back to New York. Clemens remembers
hearing Technotronic and Whitney Hous-
ton on the radio, eating his first But-
terfinger and his first slice of pizza, and
mistaking the abandoned site of the
World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Co-
rona Park for Disney World. Clemens
spoke Liberian English, and was placed
in a class for English-language learners
at P.S. 206. His teacher drew little mono-
grams on the chalkboard using each stu-
dent’s initials. Clemens’s monogram, a
“T” inside a “C,” became Telfar’s logo.
Another half dozen relatives soon
joined the family in LeFrak. Clemens
slept beside his cousins on blankets on
the floor of a bedroom. His parents slept
in a dining nook. In 1993, the family
moved to Gaithersburg, Maryland, a
suburb outside Washington with a large
immigrant population, where
several of Clemens’s aunts,
uncles, and cousins already
lived. Clemens recalls that
his elders had a suspicion of
outsiders; he blames the show
“Unsolved Mysteries.” “The
first generation did not want
you to be American, period,”
he said. “You get an Ameri-
can accent, and they’re, like,
‘Why’d you say that like that?’
We were supposed to go back, but we
never went back.” Clemens is close to
his family, and his mother books all of
his travel and comes to many of his
shows. “He was a very nice child,” she
said. “His family loves him, a lot.”
Clemens started making clothes as a
teen-ager, bleaching shirts and taking
apart jeans and putting them back to-
gether to see how they were made. He
got an education in house music and
hip-hop when his older friends took him
to the Paradox, a night club in Baltimore.
He did not think much of high school
or of life in the suburbs. “I got bored of
being there, and just the idea of being
there,” he said. In 2003, the day after he
graduated, he left for New York, and that
fall he began classes at Pace, where he
studied accounting. He moved into a
dorm in the financial district, down the
street from Century 21, the department
store that sells discounted designer cloth-
ing. In between classes, he inspected the
stock. He also adapted vintage clothes,
which he sold to a consignment store in
the East Village called Funky Lala.
The summer of 2004 was a peak of
the “tall tees” trend, when teens were walk-
ing around in oversized white T-shirts.
Sometimes the tees were muumuu-size,
reaching the kids’ knees. There was even
a rap song about the phenomenon, “White
Tee,” by the Atlanta hip-hop group Dem
Franchize Boyz. Clemens began to buy
five-packs of white Hanes T-shirts and
deconstruct them. He made a single
T-shirt out of three T-shirts and another
out of a combination of T-shirts and tank
tops. A friend who worked in SoHo at
the Vice store, a retail outlet of the media
company, showed the shirts to the store’s
buyers, who decided to sell them.
Clemens started his label with the
three-figure checks that he picked up
every week from the Vice store. An aunt
who worked for a sleepwear company
supplied him with jersey-knit remnants.
To support himself, Clemens d.j.’d at
downtown bars with dance floors—Lit,
Happy Ending, Home Sweet Home,
Orchard Bar—and at a gay club in the
East Village called the Cock. He stayed
up all night, went to classes in the morn-
ing, slept for a few hours in the early af-
ternoon, woke up, worked on his collec-
tion, and repeated the cycle. Sometimes
he’d buy something to wear from Cen-
tury 21 and return it the next day.
Gallagher, an Irish-Filipina-Ameri-
can, who worked as an assistant for the
legendary Vogue stylist Camilla Nicker-
son, got to know Clemens while she was
moonlighting as a go-go dancer at a bar
on the Lower East Side called La Cav-
erna. She was immediately impressed by
the clothes he was making, which she
described as “form studies—self-refer-
ential comments on clothing, like ubiq-
uitous forms of clothing that were re-
imagined.” In 2006, Clemens was selected
by the talent incubator Gen Art as a
“fresh face,” and he did an internship
with Cloak, a label known for military-
inspired Minimalism. He began to hone
certain forms, such as jackets and shirts
with detachable sleeves, ideal for the in-
door-outdoor shuffle of post-smoking-
ban night life. He made pieces that could
be turned upside down, worn one way
as loose-fitting pants or flipped over as
a shirt. Many Telfar garments are mul-
tifunctional: a cowl-neck that doubles as
a hood; a hood that has a baseball cap
attached to it; a scarf that ends in a pair
of mittens. “I just didn’t have the money
to make anything that wasn’t noticeable,”
Clemens said, recalling a “trenchcoat
jumpsuit” that he’d made. Most days, he
rode his bike all over the city, with a
backpack full of clothing samples.
Clemens met the video artist Ryan
Trecartin at the night club Happy End-
ing around 2005. As Trecartin recalled,
“I was doing the splits, and I think he
was d.j.’ing naked or something.” Tre-
