For almost a decade, the unofficial honor of closing New York Fashion Week — of having the last word — went to Marc Jacobs, the favored son of the city, who had gone to Paris and conquered, showing the world that American designers could hold their own with the French.
His shows, with their front rows filled with FoMs (friends of Marc) like Sophia Coppola and Kim Gordon, their runways full of supermodels, were held in the echoing armories of Manhattan, first on Lexington Avenue, then Park, and were the most anticipated event of the week. They were replete with dramatic sets and even more dramatic set-piece clothing — rife with historic reference and dressmaker details, rustling with taffeta, silk and ostrich feathers — and barred to everyone but a clutch of insiders.
But when the pandemic shut down fashion week, Mr. Jacobs decided to do his own thing. Since February 2020, he has held only one show, last June, and this time round it was Telfar Clemens who brought the week to an end. This is the designer whose motto is “not for you, for everyone,” who became very famous for a bag known as “the Bushwick Birkin” and who has spent the last two years building a business entirely independent from the fashion system.
As a harbinger of change and where things are going, there’s no better metaphor.
He didn’t put on a show. He put on a happening. And it wasn’t made to please the establishment; it was made to demonstrate that he is becoming his own establishment. (Which, in the way these things go, has only made the establishment love him more, especially as the establishment grapples with its own history of racism and need to make reparations.)
It was an hour late and an hour long. It featured not the usual 15-minute catwalk parade but two full Telfar collections and two episodes of Telfar TV, a 24-hour reality TV experience/retail channel introduced in September. Telfar TV runs on its own platform, and via app on Apple TV and Roku. Telfar and his gang (the musician Ian Isiah, the artist Aya Brown, the poet Fred Moten, the model and Tiktokker Trap Selyna, among them) control and crowdsource all the content — and also sell some stuff in what they call “drips” rather than drops.
The result was a free-form experiment in community, performance art and community as performance art, with some fashion and politics thrown in.
Voice-overs that grappled with the meaning of the Black body and spoken word poetry about generational change were mixed in with Mr. Isiah and Ms. Brown playing the role of on-screen hosts with a manic energy, occasionally flashing body parts. People went in and out of two random doors to nowhere, hung out on a swing and waited for viewers to send in videos for consideration.
At one point, Mr. Clemens and Co. seemed to be spinning a giant color wheel modeled on the “Wheel of Fortune” to decide what color Telfar bag a viewer had won. At another, Mr. Isiah wandered through racks of clothing chanting “cool down,” and then slunk under a table. Mr. Clemens stuck a pillow behind his head and pretended to go to sleep. There was some twerking. It was self-indulgent and worth seeing in equal measure.
Mr. Clemens is never unaware that he is fomenting a revolution, reshaping a space that was historically barred to Black creatives in his own image, but he does it with a kind of infectious, inventive glee.
At the end of each episode the screen went away and the lights went up and quite a lot of clothing appeared: the culmination of two years of work and many past collections that had never made it past the show stage until now. (Until recently, Mr. Clemens didn’t have the money for production.) Together, that meant a complete line that goes far beyond the bag and the collaborations for which Mr. Clemens has been known. One entitled “Performance,” meant to be evergreen, and defined by classic couture tropes — the sack dress, the cold-shoulder top — remixed and regurgitated in the everyday uniform of his borderless land.
His work outfitting the Liberian Olympic team for the Tokyo Summer Games provided the base for a line of genderless “athletic wear” that was also evening wear. It stretched from asymmetric compression tops to halter top and extra-long sweatshirts atop full sweat-skirts in a variety of lengths and slinky basketball jersey gowns and palazzo pants in Easter parade colors. Denim was extra-wide with pockets dropped down and patched on the side of the thigh, as if they’d slid around the leg; sliced, diced and frayed; or dark, traced in curvy orange stitching. Baseball pinstripes formed the high rise of a pair of jeans. There was some khaki twill.
Also country club loafers, high-top Mary Janes and cowboy-ish leather boots, plus a new bag, the “circle,” in the shape of the Telfar T-inside-a-C logo. The logo was everywhere and on almost everything, sometimes with “customer” spelled out in big letters. Mr. Clemens is not just making shirts and shorts, but badges of citizenship.
At the end of the event, after a model in a black bodysuit covered with circle bags had gyrated a bit and waved a QR code around so attendees could scan it and buy immediately, all the models came out and danced, and Telfar walked out with a microphone and said “Wow,” and then everyone screamed “Telfar TV” over and over again.
It was so loud it echoed down the halls of the site, and pretty much summed up what has become increasingly obvious as this particular show season went on: After years in which globalization was the watchword of the moment, the poles of fashion gravity have shifted and what was once the fringe is now the chaotic core.