The last time Telfar Clemens spoke to Vogue Runway was in early 2022 backstage at his fall show, which coincided with the launch of Telfar TV, a live TV streaming channel that’s the designer’s answer to QVC. Prior to that, British Vogue interviewed Clemens at his studio following his spring 2020 debut at Paris Fashion Week.
The fashion world has changed a lot since that conversation: Short-form video content by way of TikTok has taken over the world, viral micro-trends toppled the traditional fashion cycle, and Gen Z has redefined personal style. Telfar has changed too.
Beyond Telfar TV, the label stepped away from the runways and eventually stopped showing collections in the traditional format altogether. Clemens has also collaborated with Ugg, Eastpack, Converse, and Moose Knuckles, and was name-dropped by Beyoncé in a song on Renaissance. Earlier this year, the brand launched a leather version of its signature bag at Selfridges, one of London’s premier department stores, in September.
Back in 2022 Clemens took over an entirely different kind of brick-and-mortar location with a Rainbow store pop-up in New York. At the time he announced plans for a permanent store in the city. Now that space is finally opening at 408 Broadway next Saturday, November 23. The 10,000 sq. ft. flagship will be the IRL embodiment of the URL-first, culture-defining Telfar approach: Its main attraction is a giant LED screen wall streaming Telfar TV, which turns the brand’s content-obsessed shoppers into living mannequins. It’s the culmination of the social shopping dream that the industry has been trying to materialize for years.
I sat down with Clemens and Babak Radboy, the brand’s long-time artistic director, to discuss the new store, the impact of their internet-breaking approach, the state of New York City’s fashion, and how together they’re going to make Telfar ready-to-wear as big as its It-bag.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It’s been a minute since you’ve spoken with Vogue, Telfar, how are you?
Telfar Clemens: Busy, really busy, but good. Just getting ready for this next chapter of Telfar. We’ve taken our time to refine what we do, what the product is, what the mission is, what we want to do, and really creating a space now that is going to be able to be experienced by everybody.
How did you two decide to open a permanent store after having so much success online?
Clemens: It’s been a long time coming. The brand is a unisex brand. We’ve always done different retail practices like shop-in-shops to understand [retail], because there is no section for us [at stores]. As we are getting back to making a seasonal collection, it’s really important to have a space that you can experience that in. In the runway model you have a show, but then the stuff never comes out. It defeats the whole purpose of what I want to do with the brand. I want it to be mass. I want everybody to be able to take part in it. I want you to be able to come to the store and have a brand new collection that you actually saw, and everything is there because I’m the buyer. It completes the vision of what I want the brand to be.
Babak Radboy: I think it is really full-circle. It wasn’t some kind of last minute decision. It’s in a chain of infrastructure building over the last four years. It was always our intention because we had this experience of understanding how important it is to be independent in every possible way, from not having to talk to some generic idea of a customer or someone else’s idea of who that is. The best example of that is the bag. Months before the bag would start to become a phenomenon, there were buyers who were choosing to buy four of them. As long as we relied on their imagination of who exists and why [they] were buying Telfar, which was more of an “editorial purchase,” we really couldn’t move. Going online wasn’t so much our intention. It was the way we moved through that space and created our own way of doing this.
Clemens: Even being online, the bag was the quickest purchase, [but] the clothes are still a thing that people need to experience. They’re a much different thing in person. I make a unisex line that is intentionally made for everybody. The clothes are really special in their own way, they don’t need to sit next to other things to try to support them. I hate shopping. I don’t go to stores. I don’t really buy new things; I like them but I never really buy them. I want to have that experience of shopping when I was excited about going to a store in the early 2000s and being able to touch the things and try it on.
A big reason why I don’t shop IRL is the gender side, because it’s a hit or miss on how people engage with you in store when you reach across the aisle. I think that, and the pandemic, have pushed an entire generation to shop online.
Clemens: Exactly. One of my favorite shopping experiences, which was one of my first store experiences, is Century 21. Because you could physically go from, [say,] the European women’s designer section to the men’s section, and that’s what my look was, and it inspired the kinds of clothes that I make. I’m very ready for that experience to be real.
I’m curious about how you are trying to engage with the Telfar customer and expand that demographic further on the IRL, brick-and-mortar side. We have Telfar TV, the internet, how does that work at the store?
Clemens: The TV station is a public access station. It’s going to be open to the public [in the store]. Everybody is going to have an equal chance to be able to experience the store, to try things on, even if not to buy things.
Radboy: There’s things to do besides shopping.
Let’s talk about that.
Clemens: Loitering is a big thing that I want to bring back to New York City. That’s something I remember being able to do, and it’s not a thing that I do anymore. That’s how I want to be able to engage with people. It’s also an interactive space—come and shoot a music video, come and get a makeover.
The people that we are trusting to work in this space are going to really make the space what it is. A lot of my close friends, past models, people that really know the brand are part of this new venture.They’re working in the store. It’s going to be a really good time. I’m really just excited. It’s exactly what I wanted this brand to be in the beginning, because I never really wanted to go through the establishment to do the thing that I’m doing. I just want to make clothes and have my own store and sell them to people that like them. I know the store that our store used to be, which is OMG Jeans. I used to walk down that street because I used to live downtown, so I used to pass that store every single day. It was just the epitome of SoHo at that time. It’s really cool that’s the space we’re going to be in. It’s very 360.
I want to ask you about the URL side of the community you’ve created, which I think has become the blueprint for many other brands.
Radboy: That’s really a big part of what we’re responding to because we actually weren’t a social media phenomenon. It was a physical real thing that happened in the world that got reflected on social media. I see more Shopping bags on the street than I do on Instagram. In the meantime so many people copied that model, and the word “community” became this corporate buzzword everywhere in fashion that wasn’t really based on anything. People were getting representation of something. And at a certain point you can’t even tell the difference between the placebo and the real thing. It’s an interesting situation that at the height of our business we really feel like we need to ground it in reality. The space is going to do that.
What’s it been like for you two to see that the impact and influence that the Telfar brand has had, and the online approach, has been replicated?
Radboy: Pretty annoying.
Clemens: Yeah, that it could get business-fied and changed into a motto that you use. It’s annoying. But also, that’s been the history of what our career has been. I’m proud to say that we are ahead, and I want to continue to think ahead... You know, when it can be business-fied…
Radboy: You mean exploited? [laughs]
Clemens: [laughs] Yeah, exploited! It’s annoying, but I know what we do. And it makes it more special to actually keep doing that.
What’s interesting to me about the trajectory of Telfar is that because this has been replicated in the industry, many brands went the opposite way. They went from product to store to figuring out the internet and this ambiguous idea of community. You went from community to product to online to now a store. What are your thoughts on cementing the brand with a retail approach that feels more traditional, even if Telfar doesn’t necessarily do traditional.
Clemens: Like you said, it’s not a store that is traditional retail, which means that commerce isn’t the main goal of being in that space. You can participate without buying anything. How you get things too is also going to be different: If you are wearing the thing really, really well, then you should have it, and we should have an ad of it so everyone else can see you in the thing because then maybe they’ll want it. We don’t have mannequins in the store, so it’s the people in the store that are literally the billboard. It’s also a video store [there is a screen wall streaming Telfar TV], so there’s a certain feedback [loop] that you can participate in even if you’re not in the physical space.
Radboy: The part that’s hard to communicate is that we didn’t get to where we are by hatching some kind of manipulative plot. What happened was something deeply organic that was actually initiated by us taking risks and us not necessarily publicly saying what we were doing. And people don’t necessarily know that we turned down offers to buy the company and all this type of stuff, but they can sense that there’s something there, that there’s something driving the company other than your regular kind of profit model. When you watch Telfar TV, that has been our way of taking that expression that would be on the runway and showing how it actually works. So when you see us grabbing someone off the Zoom, bringing them into the studio, just that impulsiveness and that kind of spontaneity, you understand this is real, and that when they come in, we actually like them and now we’re in touch. It’s literally [a] community. When you do that type of thing, you can’t control it. You have to just create space for it. That’s the whole vibe of the store. We’re opening it up. It’s set up in a certain way so that things can happen.
Walk me through the store experience. Say I walk into the space, what am I looking at?
Radboy: The Broadway side of the store is just a giant LED screen with a door cut into it, and our community can put their stuff on that screen. It’s like a billboard that anybody can participate in. It’ll also have live feeds of what’s happening in the store. The actual structure of the store is with these pods that are hanging from the ceiling that are made by awning makers. They’re basically deli awnings, but really stripped down and they’re what hold the clothes and divide the space. It kind of takes inspiration from Telfar’s first retail [effort], which was this project called Shop Mobile with Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin of having this peripatetic, temporary/mobile vibe. We really wanted to leave the space how it was because as soon as you walk in there, it just reminds you of a certain era if you re from New York. Everything is hanging and then that space shows all the different collections and then opens up into a larger space where we’ve made a TV studio. So we can shoot episodes of Telfar TV from there, we can be pulling in random customers as they come in. We could do performances, we can do anything that a venue could offer.
Clemens: Oh and my favorite part, the Bag Bar. The Bag Bar is a special section for all you can get, basically. All of the bags including a very, very special new one that everybody’s been asking for.
Radboy: It’s lit up like a Chinese restaurant menu and it’s got every single bag and the price. And then it’s something that we could use as a literal bar when we do parties. We could probably fulfill 4,000 orders in a day if we needed to. It is almost like a physical embodiment of the drop.
That’s the Telfar fantasy. I remember when I got my first bag, which I wore on my first day at Vogue, it was through Bag Security. It’s cool that now there is a physical embodiment of that experience.
Clemens: But without all that [mimicking frantic clicking]! I’m excited to get to that period too. That you can physically go there and get it. Because I’m not an internet person. I haven’t bought anything for myself online. It’s going to be cool to be a line person, standing in line for the thing.
You mentioned that there are no mannequins at the store. How does that work, and who are these New York superstars that are going to work there?
Clemens: Lots of superstars. It’s a New York thing for sure. There’s also going to be a constant flow of new collections. So the Wilson’s collection that you just saw online will be unveiled and released for the first time. It’s this way of releasing the clothes in this exclusive way, sometimes for the first time that people will see them. They’ll come and try them on and that will be the first time the world sees them too [on Telfar TV].
Radboy: It’s a place where you can get discovered. When you try the thing on, you have a stage to go do your ’fit pic. Really elevating that way that people want to create content themselves. We might end up paying you at the end of the day [laughs].
Clemens: A lot of the models have a deep knowledge of the clothes too, so it’s people that have been in seasons and seasons [of Telfar visuals]. They have a shift every once in a while. I have a shift!
When you launched the leather bag line, I saw in the release that you said that it was launching in a shop-in-shop because this was a product you needed to touch. I think we’re starting to see a shift of younger people craving going to a store. We also want places to go to be offline, or to go be online together making TikToks and whatnot. That sounds like this store.
Clemens: I mean, New York for me wasn’t about staying in the house and staring at a screen. I never had a TV here. I just found my friends walking around and bumping into people on the street. That’s how Babak and I met. Call me old too, I’m old, but I don’t really relate to the internet and the way people do now, where they’re like oh, that person looks great [online], I want to be friends. I’m a very in-person kind of person. That’s the spirit of New York, and that’s what I’m longing to be back.
Radboy: We also experienced this phenomenon where there were hundreds of people [Telfar customers] we were told didn’t exist, that then showed up. It’s like water, people will fill the space that is given to them. People are boring when spaces are boring. What’s been going on in New York in the last 10 or 20 years will explain how people act now. It’s not like people change their mind and [realize] IRL actually exists. It exists. Even with the store experience now, you just see a long line and people don’t even know what they’re waiting for.
The Bag Bar feels like the antithesis of how one would shop for an Hermès Birkin, which is what’s funny to me about the “Bushwick Birkin” parallel, “Bushwick Birkin” being the nickname your popular bag was given by the internet. It’s really a very opposite thing. Tell me about the idea of access as you conceptualized the Bag Bar?
Radboy: It’s going to be closer to how you get into a club. We’ve been playing with the idea of how that even affects the price of things and how people get things. That’s part of the approach where everybody who wears the clothes is the model of the clothes. For us, we’re never comfortable with the idea that this is purely transactional. We’re trying to create avenues, and the TV aspect is part of that. At the end of the day, people posting our stuff was the advertisement. We didn’t have to do that. We didn’t pay celebrities to wear our stuff, and they wore it because the people around them were wearing it. They weren’t first.
Clemens: Yes. That’s the thing. There wasn’t a celebrity that was first. It was definitely people that were in New York. People were in our friend group, people that just actually liked the clothes. And I think those people started to make other people know to wear [Telfar].
Radboy: That’s how culture works. That’s how music works. The more you commercialize those spaces, the less actual genres you’re going to create and the less actual vibe you’re going to create. That’s where we come from. So we’re trying to figure out how do you make infrastructure around that type of thing rather than how do you become something else, because then you just are serving some generic idea of a customer.
I think that’s what sounds exciting to me. That rather than doing away with what you built to set up a store, you are using the store to materialize what you’ve already built.
Radboy: We’ve also seen the difference between having 50,000 customers that actually get it and having a million customers who don’t. It’s way more powerful to have that kind of tangible, connected thing.
Clemens: Specifically coming up on the 20th year anniversary of this brand, the clothes that we make are a deep expression of something that’s ahead. What Telfar does hasn’t fit in another space comfortably, so I’m very much excited about this. There’s no other way to do it.There’s no other way to do it.
It’s interesting to me also when I’m on the train coming to work. There’s several stops between where I am in Brooklyn and the office in Manhattan, and I see so many Telfar bags each morning. Sometimes I see the person and it makes sense, I know they’re one of ‘the girls,’ and others it’s less… expected.
Clemens: [laughs] Yes! Exactly. That’s the kind of intersection I want.
I wanted to hear your thoughts on the massive expansion of the bag and reaching people that, as you say, perhaps don’t “get it.” To quote Virgil [Abloh], it’s the purist versus the tourist. What do you make of that dichotomy?
Clemens: Love that.
Rabdoy: That’s also the vibe because I think that the thing that slips through the cracks because of the scale of the company is that this was all conceptual, and it still is conceptual. We had that whole Normcore thing. Our collection was titled “Extremely Normal” when the bag came out. Remember we had no customers. It was an idea, an intentional vision. It seems like a contradiction, but it’s not. And now it’s at the club, and at church, and at the funeral, and at the wedding, and at the christening.
Clemens: I’m really glad the product [went mass]. It’s like when you were walking down Broadway and you see six people with the same coat, and you’re like, what’s going on? I was like, damn, whatever’s going on there, I want to do that. I’m really ready for that effect to happen with the clothes. You couldn’t buy them, you couldn’t try them on. So now I’m really ready for that kind of feedback loop.
Radboy: 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 do you change the mass? Not just how do you serve them a generic idea.
Clemens: It’s really like we did that. That’s what the look is. I’ve seen different histories of fashion in New York. I’m ready for that to be present. That street used to be Yellow Rat Bastard, Canal Jean Company.
Rabdoy: Necessary Clothing, Transit NYC.
Clemens: Yeah! Real fucking clothes.
Radboy: That is the inspiration.
