The Year of Telfar

After creating one of the must-have bags of the year, the Telfar brand has gone from strength to strength. Vanessa Friedman finds out how it happened

(Rex Features)

In January 2020, around the time word first began to leak of Covid-19 in China, Telfar Clemens, the queer Liberian American designer who has been preaching the gospel of inclusivity for 15 years, had a wine-drenched banquet and sleepover for more than 40 of his closest creative collaborators and friends at the Pitti Palace, a former home of the Medicis in Florence.

They dined and danced and reveled in his new collection courtesy of Pitti Uomo, the menswear organization that had invited Clemens to be the guest star of the season (despite the fact that his clothes are unisex). The next day, amid the detritus, he let critics and retailers in to see what they had missed.

“It was so elegant,” said Terence Nance, a filmmaker who was there, along with Solange Knowles, Kelela and Michele Lamy. “The master’s tools and money were being used to destroy the master’s house — or at least throw paint at it that he can’t get off.”

It was also the first salvo in a conscious disengagement from the fashion system that Clemens and Babak Radboy, his artistic director and de facto business guru, had been planning for the year. 

It would include ignoring the show calendar, refusing invitations to establishment events like the Met Gala, and ending their wholesale business so that they controlled all of their own sales. At the time, rejecting the edifice on which the industry was built seemed kind of “insane,” as Clemens said, but it turned out to be the smartest thing they could have done.

“It was a current that pushed us in the right direction,” Clemens said. “So when Covid came” — when stores canceled orders and runway shows disappeared and events didn’t happen — “rather than knocking us down like everyone else, we just rode that wave.”

In 2020, the year that McKinsey projected the fashion industry would lose 90 per cent of its profit, Clemens’ business has had, the designer said (and he is wincingly aware of how this may sound, but professionally, it is a fact), “the best year.”

Oprah chose the Telfar vegan leather shopping bag as one of her “favourite things.” Issa Rae carried the mini version on “Insecure,” and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez gave it a shoutout on Instagram Stories. According to Lyst, the global search platform, the bag was the third most wanted item of the year, and searches for the brand have grown 270 per cent week on week since August. 

Clemens, 35, won a Council of Fashion Designers of America Award for best accessories designer and a Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for fashion design, was named the GQ designer of the year, and received the PETA award for Most Wanted for the handbags (even though he is a meat eater and says he “loves plastic bags”).

The bags from an upcoming collaboration with Ugg were the subject of a much-hyped presale in early December, even though they will not be available until next year. Clemens has three more collaborations with major sports brands coming out in 2021 and is mulling over two other offers.

Everything he has always stood for — financial, racial and gender inclusivity; community — is everything that the fashion establishment, in the midst of economic upheaval and a long-overdue racial reckoning, is now desperate to embrace. After years of disenfranchisement because of his background, the color of his skin and his belief system, the industry gatekeepers are practically throwing the keys to their kingdom at Clemens.

But he doesn’t want them. He’s building a kingdom of his own.

The Months of No

“We spent the year saying ‘no,’” Clemens said. He was sitting on a roller office chair in an empty loft space two floors above an identical office with a view of the Manhattan skyline. He recently doubled his headquarters, as well as leased a 10,000-square-foot warehouse in New Jersey to do his own fulfillment. He was wearing black track pants, a black sweater, black ankle-length Telfar Uggs, a black Telfar knit beanie, a black puffer coat that had been sent to him as a gift (the new space wasn’t heated yet) and a blue medical mask.

Radboy, 37, with owlish wire-rimmed glasses and a scruffy beard, sat in a chair nearby. The only other objects in the space were an old exercise bike Clemens hopped on and pedaled a while, a vintage white wicker peacock chair that had featured in an Instagram video they made to promote the Ugg collaboration, and a big metal Telfar logo: a T cuddled inside a C. 

I’m not going to be fooled into thinking I have a place in this thing where I’ve been told I have no place

Clemens and Radboy had just returned from Mexico, where they had spent a lot of the summer and early fall, along with Radboy’s wife, stylist Avena Gallagher, and their young son. Radboy and Clemens were both amused and a little wary of their sudden Most Popular status after 15 years of being essentially rejected by fashion. They kept snorting with laughter as they recounted messages that have come in.

“I’m not going to be fooled into thinking I have a place in this thing where I’ve been told I have no place,” Clemens said, rolling around on his chair. “Suddenly this person you never talked to in the entire history of your career is calling.”

Clemens, who grew up in New York and Maryland, got interested in fashion in high school. He started his line in 2005 after graduating from Pace University with a degree in accounting. He lived with his aunt in an apartment in the LeFrak City development in Queens, supporting himself as a model and DJ.

His clothes were unisex from the start, at a time when that word wasn’t really part of the fashion vocabulary. His aesthetic, which could be called “mutant basic,” essentially takes the building blocks of the American wardrobe — jeans, track pants, tank tops, hoodies — grinds them up and reimagines them for an alternate utopia. Denim transmogrifies into chaps, leather morphs into cable knit flares, and sports tops become slinky halter necks. 

He’d ride his bike into the city with essentially his whole collection on his back in every kind of weather

“He was a one-man show,” said Gallagher, who has been working with Clemens pretty much from the start. “He’d ride his bike into the city with essentially his whole collection on his back in every kind of weather, then ride to midtown to where the patternmakers were, back to Queens to get his CDs, back downtown to the clubs to DJ. In the beginning, he was fueled by this very bouncy-happy energy, but at some points he got really tired. We got really close to calling it quits.”

Clemens is largely known for his bags, which were created in 2014, come in three sizes, cost $150 (£109) to $257 (£188) and have been called “the Bushwick Birkin.” But he and Radboy are planning to make 2021 the year of clothes.

In August they created what they call the “bag security program,” in which bags are sold via preorder on the website. On a specific day of the month, the list opens up, and if you get your name on it and put your money down before the production run (usually 3,000 to 7,000 bags) is spoken for, you are safe in the knowledge that you will get what you want.

At the same time, Clemens and Radboy are secure in the knowledge that they have sidestepped the fashion practice that requires designers to fund their own production, and then pay themselves back after sales. 

The bags have become so successful that they plan to use the same strategy for the 30 shows’ worth of samples, many of them never produced, that Clemens has designed over the years. Get ready for the denim security program! The sweater program! The jewelry program!

“Honestly, it’s so miraculous,” said Gallagher, who started being paid only after the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund win in 2017. (Clemens took his first vacation in 2019.) “There’s this massive body of work that was made and then rarely seen or available and now is more relevant than perhaps ever before, because it is so pure,” she said.

But, Radboy said, the clothes “have to act like the bag. They have to be real. Often a fashion collection is not that. It’s a fantasy world. A $800 tracksuit is not a tracksuit. A $1,000 denim jacket is not a denim jacket. They are tuxedos in different forms. They have nothing to do with any normal person we would hang out with.”

“In 2020, everyone no longer knows what’s going to happen, so we get to make up what’s going to happen,” Radboy said. “The disarray makes us feel like so many more things are possible. For years we were treated like the sideshow to the actual industry.” Now, he said, their stance is, “No, we are the actual industry.”

c.2020 The New York Times Company