People poured into Opening Ceremony last night for a preview party to celebrate Telfar Clemens’ new pop-up in the store on Howard Street. The vodka flowed and a smiling life-sized sculpture of the designer sat in the window. “I want to be a new kind of American designer,” Clemens said over the noisy party din. If Clemens is consistently anything, it’s exactly that—new.
The OC pop-up from the ever-emerging designer includes soft, Snuggie-shaped tunics: “I’m all about using comfort fabrics and applying them to luxury clothes, which is a hard concept for anyone to get. They’re like, ‘But this is my bathrobe?’” It also includes leather bags emblazoned with the Telfar logo—in both full and miniature sizes—and T-shirts printed with images from the lookbook video that played overhead.
It was all very meta, and Clemens’ role shifted from the DJ throwing the party to the designer for whom the party was thrown throughout the night. “I’m about leveling the playing field between what’s fashion and what’s normal, what’s taste and what’s classic” he said. “I like mixing high-end and lowbrow and equalizing them. Not that one is good and one is bad. It just is what it is.”
Clemens is known for launching clothing collections alongside innovative, thought-provoking “projects.” Last season he created a crowdsourcing app in which the public was invited to submit looks for consideration on the runway. “The community styled my show,” he said. In February, he teamed up with Kmart for a collection presented at the New Museum.
So what’s the new, crazy concept for this Fall’s New York fashion week? “This season is all about owning my own concepts,” Clemons said. “We will be referencing ourselves in everything. Like when you see our belt loops or pockets, you know that is Telfar. We’re calling the theme ‘Patent Pending.’”