![]() ![]() The smallest Telfar bag can be had for a hundred and fifty dollars. The Birkin, a bag made by Hermès, can retail for tens of thousands of dollars. It became the label’s best-selling item, and has jokingly been called the Bushwick Birkin. He invested much of the prize, four hundred thousand dollars, in the production of the Telfar Shopping Bag, which comes in three sizes, and is modelled on the dimensions of Bloomingdale’s shopping bags. In 2017, Clemens was the recipient of the C.F.D.A./Vogue Fashion Fund award. Gallagher noted that Clemens often refers to his aunt’s Talbots catalogues: “He has always been super interested in what everybody wears rather than what the rare person wears.” “I want to be Michael Kors, but on purpose,” he has said. But he is just as influenced by Macy’s and Marshalls. The sole owner of his label, Clemens admires designers like Jean Paul Gaultier, who put men in skirt suits and borrowed from the uniforms of waiters and sailors, and Vivienne Westwood, whose relationship to London’s punk scene bears some resemblance to Clemens’s ties to New York night life. The collection was inspired by “a drunk Medici daughter on spring break in Ocean City, Maryland.” Photograph courtesy Vanni Bassetti The model Johan Galaxy walking in Telfar’s Fall/Winter 2020 show, in Florence, Italy. The resulting collection, a Telfar press release said, was “like a drunk Medici daughter on spring break in Ocean City, Maryland.” The ruched costumes in Italian Renaissance paintings reminded him of the braided T-shirts sold in beach towns. Recently, on a trip to Florence, Italy, he noticed that ubiquitous puffer jackets, seen against the city’s medieval architecture, resembled suits of armor. Clemens’s work often pays subtle homage to street retail, with its gold chains pinned in lines on red velveteen cushions and sundresses on headless Styrofoam mannequins. The label was as much an art practice as it was a clothing company, and, for many years, Telfar was worn primarily by a small, knowing cohort of people, the types who frequented the roving New York party GHE20G0TH1K and read the online arts-and-Internet-culture magazine DIS.Ĭlemens has always biked around New York, and many of the ideas for his designs have come from glimpses of pedestrians: a tank top tailored to look like it has fallen off one shoulder “drop-waist jeans” that mimic boxers peeking above sagging pants. At the time, many of his friends dressed in ways that crossed gender lines, and, a decade before Gucci, Balenciaga, and Tom Ford had coed runway shows, Telfar’s clothes were marketed as unisex. He started his brand as an undergraduate at Pace University, in 2005. Some were in the conventional places, on pants and vests others were affixed to the sleeves of T-shirts or along waistbands.Ĭlemens was born in Queens, to Liberian parents. The collection had a lot of cargo pockets. On a board were photographs of Clemens wearing various iterations of the look: a starched collar underneath a hoodie, running shorts over fishnets, track pants paired with a blazer. Clemens called it “you’ve-just-come-to-this-country kind of styling”: new and secondhand clothes combined in slightly the wrong way. He and Avena Gallagher, Telfar’s longtime stylist, had decided to play with an archetype, that of the newly arrived immigrant naïf known in the West African diaspora as a Johnny Just Come. For the Spring 2020 collection, Clemens was crossing the Atlantic to show in Paris for the first time. That day, he was wearing a net tank top with Rastafarian stripes from the dollar store, Telfar knee-length denim shorts, a gold Telfar-logo necklace, and black Converse sneakers. He is thirty-five, lanky, and graceful, with a gap-toothed grin and a smoky laugh. I visited Clemens one afternoon last July in the red Hyundai shipping container that he was using as an office. They’re sold under the slogan “Not for You, for Everyone.” The label’s clothes are standardized forms that seem to have undergone a process of estrangement. These everyday garments are the ones Clemens has returned to most often in his designs. Globalization has produced a lingua franca of T-shirts and jeans, sweats and tracksuits, polo shirts and basketball shorts. As Clemens designed his Spring 2020 collection, he was considering the cargo economy. The containers were stacked across from a corrugated-metal quonset hut in a gravel yard that recalled a landing-strip airport in a tropical country, exposed to the elements and easily dismantled in an exodus. In July, his label, Telfar, moved its studio from a warehouse in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick to four shipping containers down the street. Last summer, the fashion designer Telfar Clemens was thinking about cargo. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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