Telfar, the brand, and Telfar, the designer, have always moved at their own pace. On Saturday night, Telfar Clemens summoned friends, fans, and press—amidst which there were many intersections—to Cortlandt Alley, behind his Canal Street store, to celebrate two decades of the label he started as a teenager in Queens. His famous askew tank tops hung from clotheslines above a crowd of around 200 who gathered to see his much anticipated return to the runway after a long absence. The summer solstice was on Friday, making Saturday one of the longest days of the year with over 15 hours of daylight. Telfar used up every last bit of it—the show started over two hours late; though once it got going, no one was counting.
“If you think we’re late, we’re not. We’re on time, bitch!” exclaimed Jorge Gitoo Wright, who cast the show, at around the hour and a half mark, adding: “If you don’t like the looks, we don’t like you!”
What was not to like? Late last year, when Clemens opened his first Telfar store, he spoke about his ambitions with ready-to-wear. “It’s like when you were walking down Broadway and you saw six people with the same coat—whatever’s going on there, I want to do that,” he said. In a way, he already had: His Shopping Bag was an It-bag before it became a mass item with dupes sold a stone’s throw away from the real thing. “I’m really ready for that effect to happen with the clothes,” he added. Babak Radboy, the brand’s long-time artistic director, elaborated: “We weren’t trying to see a thousand people in a sweatshirt with the Telfar logo on it. We were trying to see a thousand people in an upside-down tank top. We wanted the granny and the mechanic. That was the idea of mass, of how you change the mass. Not just how you serve them a generic idea.”
There were no generic ideas here: Clemens has always had a knack for abstracting wardrobe classics and transforming them into idiosyncratic expressions with the ineffable coolness of a true New Yorker. This weekend’s show offered them in spades. The collection featured seven capsules, which will be dropping monthly between right this minute and the fall. Most impactful were the suits rendered in casual jerseys. There was a softness and nonchalance to the cut of these pieces that felt new and forward-looking—a reminder of the way Telfar’s runway shows have often offered an accurate and timely read of the zeitgeist.
Many of these suit-cum-tee looks were accompanied by the new Telfar “Plastic Bag,” an expansion on the Shopping Bag, that replicates the all-too familiar plastic bags available in delis all throughout NYC. These will surely charm New Yorkers (and the many who emulate their style), though this writer’s money is on the Telfar jellies that accessorized most looks—expect to see them everywhere once they drop. The collection was rounded out by denim, khaki, and camo capsules, which included backwards polo shirts, upside-down and double-ended tank tops, and other pieces that felt like looking at an all-American wardrobe through a kaleidoscope.
The headline, however, belongs to the casting. Featuring some of New York’s finest, including Luar designer Raul Lopez, artists Gia Love and Ian Isaiah, chef Danny Bowen, poet Precious Okoyomon, makeup artist Raisa Flowers, and even Clemens’s mother Hawa Clemens, it was a gathering of the community and support system that Telfar has built over the past two decades. More than that, it demonstrated that for a label like Telfar, an independent fashion unicorn and possibly the largest Black-owned label in America, that it does indeed take a village.
Twenty years in, the fashion industry at large—with its newly found penchant for street casting, guerrilla-style social media, affordable It-bags, and funky tank tops—seems to have caught up with Telfar. But this show was a touching display of the core tenets of Telfar that others have tried to co-opt and adopt with not an ounce of this label’s authenticity: community, symbiosis, and an undeniable homegrown energy. As a friend put it after the show, “I just remembered why I love New York.” Another summed the whole thing up succinctly: “It’s hard not to root for the home team.”
