No Mannequins

Receiving the Telfar sale emails every other goddamn day stresses me out. How are new products already half price!? What is this wizardry? I love the brand and was wondering: since opening a new brick-and-mortar store downtown about six months ago, buzz and beauty aside, how is it all going?

For the record, I fuck with Telfar heavy and have for years. Before I ever saw Telfar Clemens the person IRL looking cool at some party. Before I knew anyone who worked with the brand or ran with them. Before the audacious marketing and editorials — the pop-up at Rainbow on Fulton, the South Street Seaport shoot for System, paying inmates’ bail at Rikers, the puffy coat collection, the Ugg collection. Before I bought the belt or went baby blue weekender. Before they dressed the Liberian team at the Olympics, or even before their vegan leather bags legit took over the game. I was a supporter the minute I was introduced to the very concept of this person named Telfar out here working. Another kid like me from Queens who soaked up one of the illest periods of culture and repurposed both the experience and the ephemera to make something new. I’m talking being a teenager in New York City in the late ’90s/early 2000s in these streets before internet access and right there when everything changed. Telfar was — and is — the blueprint.

We’re now at the 20+ year mark of watching Telfar and team build a world within our world. A group of people blurring it all or maybe rather speaking to that blur. Clothing and lifestyle truly gender-fluid, not fucking with binaries period — that started back when you had to rely on your guts, your people, the schooling you sought out, and your own self-education to understand the right way to think about this one life we have — before the algorithms fed us pre-packaged content about all of it. Telfar presents this blurriness with a level of execution we’ve not quite seen, making essentially avant-garde, unisex fashion mainstream and accessible.

The new store is a triumph. The clothes and just all of it is a sexy fucking triumph. It’s as if everything at the old Barney’s was made by one brand and we were on the best timeline. Brown lambskin leather button-downs, wrap-around tops, perfect thermals. The team owns the production on everything from their bags to track pants, top to bottom, in a 13,000-square-foot atelier nearby. The new retail store’s 10,000-square-foot location used to be an OMG Jeans. (They should collab.) If you know it, you know that space was damn near a depot. It looks as though they stripped it down completely. You walk through these white vestibules that give almost end-of-the-world vibes but fashion. Picture people in like tight, fly-ass hazmat suits or something walking through decontamination tunnel pods. No, but I read Telfar’s creative director Babak Radboy tell Vogue that the structures are made by deli awning makers! Thinking about the people who build bodega awnings being asked to come build structures for the epitome of street luxury in Soho is too perfect for me.

You’re browsing the clothes and accessories and it’s this high-quality experience, but then you emerge into a huge multifunctional space: part warehouse, part photo studio, part pop-up, part art installation, part showroom. Leaning into our voyeurism-dominated commercial landscape, the entire store functions as if you had backstage access to a high-end movie set for the day. The ceiling is rigged like a studio with cameras, lights, fixtures everywhere. I took a few iPhone photos inside and only after seeing them several times over a week did I realize I had accidentally captured myself in one. A shot of the store’s deepest corner to the back right, against a wall of screens, in what looks like an elevated late-night TV set. Zooming in, you see me in my big jacket on one of the screens, at an angle above and behind my right shoulder. I had no idea I was even being filmed, but there I was: surveilling and being surveilled all the while.

The store is an event space. The event is we’re alive and we did this shit. What I really like is how that feeling is shared and made actionable. Telfar and crew getting a big store downtown means so do their friends, and their friends’ friends. There’s already been several times since the store opened where gatherings spilled onto the sidewalk: runway shows, new product releases. In several profiles, Telfar and Radboy speak of the space doubling as a content studio, where people — whether they buy anything or not — are able to try things on, get fits off, hit the stage, interact with the screens, or “shoot a music video.” There are no mannequins. The brand wants you to understand that’s what you and the people running around are for.

It makes me think about the precedents for similar-feeling cultural hubs — specifically centered around signaling fashion interest — in the city. For me Queens Center Mall might have to be in there, stores on Steinway Street, massive downtown spaces like Yellow Rat Bastard and Canal Jeans Company. Everyone has their own touch points depending where you spent time geographically and what your interests are, right? For me it was magazine shops and sneaker stores, being interested in the style gods holding court at smaller boutiques like Nom de Guerre, Opening Ceremony later, skateboarders at Union-then-Stüssy, then Supreme. I think about some of the bigger torchbearers now — what Angelo Baque is doing with the Awake NY store in the Lower East Side, the hit block parties, the meditation sessions Kenji Summers runs there every third Sunday. Or Tremaine Emory turning the old Union/Stüssy address into his African Diaspora Goods, getting Theaster Gates to design the store, creating a research library subsuming Arcana’s collection on African arts. Jeff Staple just opened back up 21 Mercer for business, throwing parties, ping pong matches and the like, but I think about my own experience working with Jeff and team, J Scott, Paulo (RIP the legends) at Reed Space on Orchard Street. Infamous Nike drops and product launches aside, the book signings and art openings, the early Odd Future performances, and even the casual gatherings on some random Tuesday were the real generative moments.

So many homegrown hero creatives are tired of the need to hide the seams, to bury the references, the connections, and community behind some single name on the door. I think the point for Telfar is to build with one another; cool product is an offshoot. There is an architecture of hidden infrastructures, economic pathways, and social networks to scale. Maybe no store is simply some retail outpost. That’s what I take from ideas like Telfar’s open mics held in the alleyway around the corner, the “bag bar” (ability to process 4,000 orders in a day), or the move to hand out real bags to people selling alleged counterfeits outside on Canal Street. What if a store is a node in a much deeper, pre-existing system of movement and exchange in the area, one that extends beyond what is often visible? That’s not just commerce — it’s a reflection of the people and through lines that give these spaces their energy to begin with.

“Come do your homework here. We’ll make space for you,” frequent Telfar collaborator Ian Isiah told Essence. A store can circulate ideas as much as products — maybe even more so.