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The fashion crowd is fickle and—during fashion month—notoriously time poor. So it’s a testament to the phenomenon that is Telfar that they decided to wait not one but two hours to see the brand close off New York Fashion Week. Staged in a studio space at Pier 17 of the South Street Seaport in Manhattan, Telfar’s fall winter ‘22 collection, aptly titled ‘WOW’, was unveiled in an immersive video-and-runway event that started and hour late, and ran for a full hour (most runway shows last no longer than 15 minutes). The fashion moments were punctured with episodes of Telfar TV, the new TV channel the brand’s founder, Telfar Clemens, ambitiously launched last September.
The end result was, as critic Vanessa Friedman put it in The New York Times, “a free-form experiment in community, performance art and community as performance art, with some fashion and politics thrown in.” But this should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with The Telfar Effect. Perhaps best known as the creator of the “Bushwick Birkin”—logoed top-handle tote bags that are affordable and made in high quantities, and yet perpetually impossible to get your hands on—Clemens’ fashion ethos has always been democratic and anti-establishment. His clothes are made “not for you, for everyone”, an approach that has seen him thrive as an independent label existing largely outside of the fashion ecosystem (while still being undeniably courted by it). His fans range from Chloë Sevigny to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as the hundreds of attendees to his latest fashion show, which was so packed it was forcibly transformed from seated to standing, according to The Cut’s Cathy Horyn.
All of which is to say that focusing solely on the clothes (we’ll get to those) is to somewhat miss the point. The accompanying Telfar TV clips included spoken word poetry by the cultural theorist Fred Moten that meditated on the treatment of Black bodies in fashion and popular culture. As a designer that has unapologetically touted Black excellence in fashion for more than a decade, but has only been accepted by the mainstream fashion establishment in the last couple of years, Clemens was purposefully, indulgently taking his time with his first runway show in two years.
As for the clothes themselves, they were refreshingly easy and wearable. The sportswear borrowed elements from the uniforms Clemens designed for the Liberian Olympic team to wear to the Tokyo Summer Games, including oversized sweatshirts, wide-cut track pants, and dresses made from basketball jerseys. The denim was low-slung and baggy, there were recurring khaki pieces, like structured jackets and maxi skirts, and an abundance of T-logoed accessories, from cowboy boots to loafers, hoop earrings and new handbag silhouettes. “I make the clothes that you actually wear,” Clemens told Interview after the presentation. “It’s like the most staple things. It’s clothes that we were working on pre-pandemic, and there’s a build up of all these different experiences that we’ve been having. We’ve been making clothes for people to buy, making them at the right price, making them not just for the runway.”
