THENEWYORKER,MARCH16, 2020 71
“And, also, you will be satisfying the need for public art.”• •
He spent his first full day in Queens at
home, resting. He stayed up late that
night. He exercised in his bedroom,
then sat up watching “Joseline’s Caba-
ret,” the reality show about a strip club
in Miami.
Midnight came and went. It was
January 21st, Clemens’s thirty-fifth
birthday. Sitting in his bathroom, where
the Wi-Fi signal in his aunt’s apart-
ment is strongest and where he had
therefore set up a small office, he began
reflecting on his life. He used to joke
that he wanted to design clothes that
people would want to steal. But, at the
end of December, a burglar backed a
truck into the yard with the shipping
containers, broke into one of them, and
stole five crates of clothes from the la-
bel’s archives. Clemens was ready for
more stability: his own apartment; a
place where his archive could be safely
stored; an office where the Telfar crew
could assemble every day during nor-
mal working hours; a “grown-up situ-
ation.” It was time to move out of the
shipping containers.
Thinking about his plans for the
year, Clemens walked with his laptop
into the kitchen to make a snack. Then
he started to smell smoke. He walked
around the apartment, checking on his
aunt, who was asleep. He went out on
the terrace. He went back to the bath-
room and opened the door. The room
was in flames. He woke up his aunt,
who called 911, then dashed around col-
lecting her things until he had to take
her by the arms and make her leave. The
fire was electrical and had started in a
light fixture. The firefighters smashed
out the windows in Clemens’s room,
where he kept boxes of clothes from
his earliest collections. Everything was
flooded and covered in soot.
“My birthday present was a literal
fire under my ass,” Clemens told me
during New York Fashion Week, in
mid-February, when I visited him at
the apartment-hotel in the financial
district where he was staying while re-
pairs were being made at LeFrak. He
was wearing a taupe zip-up hoodie and
a pair of Telfar sweatpants made of
thermal waffle weave. The apartment’s
living room was decorated in a kind of
lowest common denominator of urban
style, with a black modernist couch and
stainless-steel appliances. He was en-
joying living among corporate nomads
and working out in the gym downstairs.
Outside, it was raining.
Despite the tumult, he seemed se-
rene. The fire had come laden with sym-
bols, he said. He showed me a photo-
graph of the card he had pulled at a
tarot reading in Paris before the fire:
the Four of Coins, from Miss Cleo’s
deck. It has an illustration with what
looks like wisps of smoke in the back-
ground. Living near Pace, he felt that
he had returned to his first days in New
York. He could take the same walk to
the Lower East Side to buy T-shirts
that he had taken when he was eigh-
teen. Century 21 was down the street.
All this seemed meaningful, he said,
because, after the whirlwind of a sea-
son spent in the international fashion
circuit, he wanted to remind himself of
who he used to be, the striver biking
around with his entire collection on his
back. In the fall, he said, he had real-
ized, “I don’t need to be this European
person that’s, like, ‘I’m going to design
Balenciaga.’” He had mostly ignored
New York Fashion Week. He was not
motivated to make the kind of fashion
that served a small class of out-of-town-
ers, and he contemplated how he might
sell his clothes in a different way when
he was in New York. “Telfar Home,”
he joked. Perhaps he’d open a pop-up
store. “People can come to Queens!”Trecartin and Fitch were planning to
build him a tiny house on their farm
in Ohio, where Telfar clothes would be
sold on the honor system.
Clemens wanted to make ambitious
designs for his friends, and also to have
his name on the side of a bus. The col-
laboration with the Gap had been offi-
cially announced in January. It would
give him an opportunity to do what
he’d always wanted to do—to design
an item of clothing so popular that, if
you took a group of Americans in any
city, one of them might be wearing a
shirt of his design. “That ability to be
present everywhere,” he said. “You know
it’s me. You know what it is.” For the
collection, Clemens was returning to
his archive, studying the pieces that he
thought might become iconic. “What’s
the next bag?” he said. “What type of
thing do you want to be in the world?”
He said he thought that Telfar could
take its place among other American
“life style” brands that sell the basic
clothes that everyone wears—Polo
Ralph Lauren, DKNY, Calvin Klein.
He would be able to make clothes that
ranged in size from extra-extra-small
to extra-extra-large, that people in the
Midwest would be able to buy. He would
show that ubiquity did not have to mean
monotony. It could also be noticeable.
“I’m American,” he said. “There’s no
reason this can’t work.”