cartin and his collaborator Lizzie Fitch
had started to make hyperactive, reality-
television-inflected video art, and Clem-
ens was soon among their regular per-
formers. They took trips to Kmart and
Walmart together, to buy costumes. Tre-
cartin told me that Telfar clothes re-
mind him of Ohio, where Trecartin now
lives. “There’s something middle about
everything,” he said. “Like a medium,
like an average—but it doesn’t make it
less unique. It’s like a mutant.”
In the early years of the brand, mem-
bers of the fashion media attended Clem-
ens’s shows but rarely wrote about them.
He was forever the “emerging” designer.
“It was that ‘off ’ thing you did during
New York Fashion Week,” Clemens told
me. Financing the work demanded in-
genuity. For a time, Clemens was rep-
resented by the Paris-based New Gal-
erie, and he attempted to sell the videos
he produced for his collections, along
with the entire lines, as a single art work.
Clemens courted corporate sponsors—
American Apparel, Supima—that could
supply him with raw materials. The film-
maker Leilah Weinraub, who has di-
rected videos for Telfar, described the
label in those days as “kids putting out
ideas that stylists who had real jobs at
fashion houses would bring to their real
jobs working with celebrities.”
In 2012, Shayne Oliver, who was Clem-
ens’s first boyfriend and remains one of
his best friends, relaunched Hood By Air,
a label he had started in 2006 with Raul
Lopez, and the label’s high-concept street-
wear became a hit with young people and
pop stars. Weinraub became Hood By
Air’s C.E.O. and began to improve the
label’s public relations, supply chains, and
distribution. Clemens, who shared an
office with the brand, started to make a
similar shift, turning his conceptual label
into a manufacturing company. He ad-
mits that he had avoided looking at “all
the ugly stuff I didn’t want to look at, like
spreadsheets and numbers.”
Around this time, Radboy, who had
long worked with the brand, became the
label’s artistic director. He, Gallagher, and
Clemens set about trying to make Tel-
far commercially viable. They did so with
comic exaggeration, launching the Fall
2014 collection with the slogan “Extremely
Normal™.” Radboy wooed Kmart as a
sponsor and decorated a space in the New
Museum to resemble the store. Clemens
and Radboy designed merchandise, in-
cluding Telfar-branded T-shirts that said
“Customer,” and printed fake gift cards.
They created the first Telfar bags as props.
“Everything about that production was
a leap,” Fatima al Qadiri, a friend who
has composed music for eleven of Tel-
far’s runway shows, recalled. “Babak is a
perfectionist, and Clemens needed Babak
to come in and whip people into shape.”
Trying to attract new corporate spon-
sorship, Radboy sought out partnerships
with brands that few people would as-
sociate with fashion. In 2015, he made a
deal with the hamburger chain White
Castle, which hosted the after-party
for the Spring/Summer 2016 show at
its restaurant on Eighth Avenue. Rad-
boy liked the event—at which alcohol
was served next to the soda machine
and Clemens’s friends danced on the
counter—particularly because it “felt
illegal,” he said. Jamie Richardson, a
vice-president at White Castle, who is
a father of five, a former Scout leader,
and a member of the Kiwanis Club in
Columbus, Ohio, remembered the night
as “beyond Narnia” and “just really pro-
found.” In 2017, Telfar redesigned White
Castle’s uniforms, giving the unisex
T-shirts an internal pocket and a sailor-
suit-like collar that Clemens calls the
“split-neck polo.” He also created a cap-sule collection based on the uniforms,
and the proceeds went to a bail fund for
minors on Rikers Island.
In the past three years, Clemens has
repurposed the Budweiser logo in his
clothes with the same enthusiasm that
Tommy Hilfiger has shown for the
American flag, and has put Beats head-
phones on his models during runway
shows. Telfar tends to turn down spon-
sors that want to use the brand to mar-
ket to what Radboy has called the “de-
sire for vicarious black authenticity.”
The brand prefers companies, like White
Castle or, most recently, the Gap, that
can introduce Telfar to people beyond
cosmopolitan centers.
Attending Paris Fashion Week was
a step toward getting the attention of
European critics. For Clemens, it was
the fulfillment of a longtime dream.
Several friends were coming, including
Kelela, Precious Okoyomon, and Jeremy
O. Harris. So were Clemens’s mother,
two of his four brothers, and a cousin.
In the days leading up to the show, Clem-
ens, Gallagher, and Radboy worked out
of a small studio in Le Marais with
painted wood floors and a skylight that
leaked when it rained. Elsewhere in the
city, police were teargassing protesters
with the gilets jaunes, but in the studio
a Nespresso machine was buzzing away“F.Y.I., the last barber I ate went way too short.”