He and Avena Gallagher, Telfar’s longtime stylist, had decided to play with an archetype, that of the newly arrived immigrant naïf known in the West African diaspora as a Johnny Just Come. For the Spring 2020 collection, Clemens was crossing the Atlantic to show in Paris for the first time. That day, he was wearing a net tank top with Rastafarian stripes from the dollar store, Telfar knee-length denim shorts, a gold Telfar-logo necklace, and black Converse sneakers. He is thirty-five, lanky, and graceful, with a gap-toothed grin and a smoky laugh. I visited Clemens one afternoon last July in the red Hyundai shipping container that he was using as an office. They’re sold under the slogan “Not for You, for Everyone.” The label’s clothes are standardized forms that seem to have undergone a process of estrangement. These everyday garments are the ones Clemens has returned to most often in his designs. Globalization has produced a lingua franca of T-shirts and jeans, sweats and tracksuits, polo shirts and basketball shorts. As Clemens designed his Spring 2020 collection, he was considering the cargo economy. The containers were stacked across from a corrugated-metal quonset hut in a gravel yard that recalled a landing-strip airport in a tropical country, exposed to the elements and easily dismantled in an exodus. In July, his label, Telfar, moved its studio from a warehouse in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick to four shipping containers down the street. Last summer, the fashion designer Telfar Clemens was thinking about cargo.
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