70 THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020
as models came by to try on clothes and
practice their walks through a cobble-
stone courtyard. “Thank you so much!”
Telfar, holding a packet of madeleines
in one hand, said to a departing model.
His lack of French was a source of suffer-
ing. “I can’t even make small talk with
all these boys,” he said.
Gallagher and Radboy’s son, Mal-
colm, was being babysat by anyone he
happened to be near. After a difficult
morning—he had thrown his Mario
doll on to the studio’s roof, a total loss—
he sat on a love seat holding a paper
bag of candy. “You can look at the candy
and smell the candy, but you can only
eat it after dinner,” Gallagher told him,
glancing over from the dressing area.
“Where are you from?” she asked a
model who spoke English, as she tied a
drawstring at the bottom of a cream-
colored T-shirt, which had a band of
brown horizontal stripes across the chest
that reminded me of an Ocean Pacific
skateboarding shirt from another decade.
The model, whose name was Brahim
Hassan, said that he was from Chad. He
was polite and a little bashful. When
he’d arrived, Gallagher and Clemens had
held a whispered conference of delight
about his ears, which stuck out.
Clemens liked working in Paris.
“There’s not that much going on, in
comparison to New York, where there’s
like a million things and it feels like it’s
Fashion Week all the time or some-
thing,” he said. “People just actually go
to sleep. They go and eat dinner, and
they go to sleep.”
T
elfar’s runway show took place at
La Cigale, a historic music venue
in Montmartre, on a Monday. The mod-
els emerged, wearing cargo-inspired
looks, while on the screen behind them
handsome young people floated on rafts
and were wanded through T.S.A. check-
points. The story of travellers confront-
ing a surveillance state was cut with
mini music videos by the rapper Bby-
Mutha and the musician Steve Lacy.
The film reminded me of waiting in the
security line at John F. Kennedy Air-
port, where luxury-perfume ads play on
a loop on L.E.D. screens overhead. At
the film’s dénouement, a group of mod-
els, passing around a joint as the sun set
over Oakwood Beach, discussed the In-
ternet memes of last summer. “It was,
like, Why y’all talking about Popeyes
when the Amazon is on fire?” Johan
Galaxy, wearing his blond wig, said.
At the end of the show, the models
and the Telfar team returned to the
runway and started dancing. Harris,
who was wearing Telfar running shorts
over fishnets with a pair of Mary Janes
that Telfar had designed for Converse,
sprang up and joined them. The rest of
the audience seemed unsure how to re-
spond. When they realized that the
show was over, they applauded politely.
Backstage afterward, Clemens, Galla-
gher, and Radboy sipped champagne
and tried to parse the reaction.
“French people are stiff as fuck,”
Clemens said.
Gallagher agreed. “I looked out
there, and they were, like”—she made
an expressionless face.
“I’m not pressed,” Clemens said.
“They all said, ‘Thanks for coming to
Paris.’ That’s all they’ve said. ‘Thanks
for doing this here.’ I’m, like, O.K....
does that mean you liked it?”
That evening, at a party at a bar
nearby, there were pearl chokers on men,
earrings that looked like bunches of
grapes, do-rags, intricate spirals of braids,
mullets. One woman had dyed a black
Telfar logo into her pink hair. Shortly
before 3 a.m., a d.j. was playing Brazil-
ian funk and Nigerian pop, and the crowd
had thinned just enough that the truly
committed could dance more freely. Sud-
denly, the music stopped. “This is an an-
nouncement that the person who is
throwing this party just got thrown out
of it,” someone said into a microphone.
A murmur of discontent filled the room.
“Telfar got thrown down the stairs of
his own party, so we are all going to leave
this place. It’s a wrap, it’s a wrap, it’s a
wrap! How do you say that in French?”
Downstairs, stone-faced security
guards were confronted by an angry
crowd. The bouncers had pepper-sprayed
a group of Telfar interns, models, and
hairdressers, who were crying and pour-
ing milk into their eyes. A few people
shouted obscenities. A plastic water bot-
tle hit a wall. Then another one. Clemens
was down the street, surrounded by his
friends. He explained that he’d learned
that a bouncer had handled his mother
roughly, so he’d asked the club to make
the bouncer leave. An argument fol-
lowed, which escalated until Clemenswas dragged down the stairs. The bounc-
ers pepper-sprayed the interns and as-
sistants who came to his defense.
“I was just looking at this guy, like,
You need to go, you need to go, you
need to go,” Clemens said of the bouncer.
He groaned. “I haven’t got into a fight
since I was eleven.”
“I know you haven’t,” a friend next
to him said. “Because you’ve had other
people fighting for you. You can’t fight!”
“I can’t fight,” Clemens said. “I can’t
fight.” A car was called. Clemens got
into it with Kelela, and they drove off.
“It was like the film we made hap-
pened in real life and vice versa,” Rad-
boy said weeks later, at the shipping
container. The reviews of the show had
been positive, but the usual words re-
surfaced. “Clemens’s message of com-
munity and inclusivity is hard to re-
sist,” one critic wrote. “It was a super-
energizing start to the week.”
Radboy and Clemens were already
planning their next show, for Pitti Uomo,
the men’s fashion event in Florence in
early January. Partly in response to their
time in Paris, they were thinking about
the dynamics of guest and host, and how
a word like “inclusivity” can carry the
implication that an included person is a
guest in someone else’s house. They had
decided to spend their budget on flying
friends and family to Italy for an all-night
“congress,” at the Palazzo Corsini, that
would be closed to the public. Radboy
had built a round conference table that
had microphones; it was inspired, he said,
by the “United Nations or ‘Dr. Strange-
love.’” At its center, there would be a
conversation pit that doubled as a re-
hearsal space. Beds would be set up for
those who wished to nap. The idea was
that the participants would make things
among themselves, without having to
sell, pitch, or convince others that what
they did deserved “inclusion.” For the
runway show, which would be held on
the wine-and-food-stained table the next
day, the sanctum would be opened to the
fashion press and buyers, who, finally, in-
vited in as guests, would experience “the
result and residue” of the party.A
t the end of January, after four
months of living mostly in Eu-
rope, Clemens missed LeFrak. He
wanted to sleep in his bed and ride his
bike again. So he returned to New York.