Brontez Purnell on the rise of Telfar Clemens

I met Telfar Clemens in 2003 (or 2004?) at an 18+ Hip Hop party in the Soma District of San Francisco –  I’m so old that I went to 18+ HIP HOP PARTIES IN SOMA IN THE EARLY 2000s (something that would be virtually unheard of these days). I forget the name of the party but the vibe was like if the Papi Juice party was more ratchet and had more fist fights on the dance floor. Like, it was beautiful, but I digress.

I remember seeing him on the dance floor for the first time and I was like, “Is this dude a model?” ’Cause like, I don’t know, San Francisco was always such an anti-fashion city (still is), and I remember him dressed in like speciality denim, cowboy boots, a scarf, a felt cowboy hat and skinny suspenders. In a town where we all just wore like, Vans, ripped jeans and band t-shirts, he looked like a hipster version of an 1800s French-Canadian fur trapper (a full decade before every hipster lifted this look), and I was like, “Oh, he’s like elevated”; and so, in fact was a model. Later, he walked runway for Cloak and I was gagged, but also hanging in the lore was the iconic Electro Clash dance party he threw with fellow fashion god Shayne Oliver, called Banjee in The Basement. It was the indie sleaze era and I was young and, well, heavily sedated. I can’t recall actually attending Banjee in the Basement? Or did I? But I remember the spirit of it, hanging in the air, very hard. Like Telfar was one of the underground kings of New York, “and don’t you forget it”, kind of vibes.

Even recalling the indie sleaze era, how we all acted like fucking demons, but his command of space was different, stoic, yet acutely aware. His vibe: coolly unchaotic. You could tell behind his eyes that he was cooking up something, and then one day it all hit.

Established in 2006 as a fashion line, you could say that the crowning opus of Telfar was the brand’s infamous bags. In 2020, the Telfar bag became a fetish item, bought by hundreds of thousands of Black consumers – and to it’s credit by simple word of mouth and social media push. I remember surmising the logo and thinking, “Wait, isn’t that the Tevin Campbell logo?!” The entire trickster IQ of a boy genius at work –  the proliferation of Telfar felt something like a coup. The entire swag felt like an avant-garde take on the bygone Pro-Black clothing line FUBU (For Us By Us), but with an elevated cool. Like one of those “if you know, you know” moments. There was never any major national campaign pushing it through the ether; I was an authentic come-up, and a weird cultural blip, that inspired a sense of hope – “a luxury item” was more than just a price point, but could also be floated on the idea of a shared group catharsis. 

In the de-escalation of the highs of that time period, we are all aware of the price we paid for 2020 – from the Black Lives Matter movement and beyond. In short, we were never supposed to have that level of revolution using the master’s tools – and the decline from that has felt rapid in parts. But then, of course, the revolution always recalculates, repurposes, then detonates. This new era of unfolding has yielded from the Telfar camp yet another golden egg: Telfar TV and its newest offering: a “reality” tv show called New Models. As Babak puts it, “New Models is basically a reality show where we announce open castings for New Models – a thousand people show up to be new models,  and then we agitate, propagandise and put them through challenges, insisting that we were not talking about fashion models at all but ‘new models’ of social political organisation and resistance. Which we are.”

Though commerce and consumerism give the illusion of “choice”, the cult of Telfar has done a perhaps perishable but powerful thing; given an open invite to what is a deeply exclusive party

The format of the show deeply problematises the term “reality” TV. It sits in a dizzying Venn diagram of what feels simultaneously like a Warholian Factory happening, the QVC tele-auction next work, a filmed open mic/improv night, and a kind of surrealist, tongue-in-cheek experimental form that is something altogether unclassifiable; a deep signifier but simultaneously liminal.

Though fashion is ultimately seen as superficial,  however you cut the cloth, what we wear and why we wear are deeply political choices. The Telfar label has taken this perilous faultline of division and made a home in it. New Models has taken a boldly social[ist?] stance and blurred a line in the sand with it. Though commerce and consumerism give the illusion of “choice”, the cult of Telfar has done a perhaps perishable but powerful thing; given an open invite to what is a deeply exclusive party.

Paradigm Shift features work by Sophia Al-Maria, Meriem Bennani, Dara Birnbaum, Foday Dumbuya, Cao Fei, Tremaine Emory, Nan Goldin, Arthur Jafa, Derek Jarman, JulianKnxx Mark Leckey, Josèfa Ntjam, Pipilotti Rist, Martine Syms, TELFAR, Ryan Trecartin, Gillian Wearing, and Andy Warhol. The show runs at 180 Strand until December 21.