Designer Spotlight: Telfar

Jan 26

“Lemme see what you just got in the mail... A TELFEZZY!”

This sound has been all over my TikTok For You Page, showing ecstatic customers unboxing the fashion world’s new staple bag: the Telfar shopping bag. Vegan leather in endless colors, 3 different sizes, a centered, embossed logo, and two straps are the inner workings of these iconic tote-style bags.

Telfar Clemens, born in Queens, New York, started his unisex fashion label in 2005. His main goal for the label was for it to remain completely genderless and was “not for you, for everyone.” Clemens is drawn to clothes that feel comfortable and feel like him and approached designing by using the basics, like t-shirts, and distressing and upcycling them into more elegant pieces. Often doing runway shows in obscure places

and not on the usual fashion week schedule, he has found his own lane of creatives and friends that attend his shows. Ready To Wear 2020 ended with a bang: models dancing and rapping along to music following a show where the punk club in Paris’ queer area was made into a mini-stadium. The featured models walked in front of a screen playing videos of the clothes in other circumstances; the viewer got to see the clothes walk on the runway, climb on rocks, and blow in the breeze on a raft. This is a great way for customers to see the pieces in a non-fashion context and let them picture themselves actually wearing their clothes in real life.

In 2017, the brand was awarded the CFDA Fashion Fund Award and just last year in 2020, Telfar was awarded Accessories Designer of the year from the CFDA. The bag created in 2014 has become the newest “It” bag. In fashion vernacular, an “It” bag is a newer term for the old idea of a luxury handbag that has become very popular and synonymous with the specific brand that designed it. Brands like Hermes have their Birken, Fendi have their Baguette bag, and of course Dior has their saddlebag. Telfar’s bags have been so popular that the brand has come up with a new system of letting customers preorder using their “bag security program,” where once a month customers can pay upfront and get in line to have confidence that they will get their desired bag. If you yourself decide to wait until these babies restock, please set a timer. Telfar bags tend to sell out incredibly fast, even with the 3,000-7,000 made for the multiple drops per month. This bag has been dubbed the “Brooklyn Birken” as it allows for the average fashion consumer to get a luxury faux leather bag for a reasonable price, while still maintaining the high quality that luxury bags should be.

Clemens’ ideology of having attainable prices for the bags has also trickled down to his Ready To Wear collections. He and his business partner Mr. Radboy want the clothes not to exist in some fantasy world, but to have a more reasonable price so that the average fashion consumer can obtain the beautiful garments without having to break the bank in order to afford the pieces. Telfar’s initial customers were queer, black folk in New York City, and with the crazy-expensive cost of living there, he wanted to make sure that they could afford and wear his clothes.

This brand has always been one to look out for, but I think that we will be seeing Telfar’s “T in C” logo now more than ever. The brand is truly a trailblazer within the fashion industry and shows upcoming designers and young queer folks how to embrace being “different” and encourage them to be themselves in clothes that are not for you but are for everyone.