Telfar Clemens Invited Paris to a Runway Show, Then Held It at a Brooklyn Sample Sale

The phone rang before the second look. On Tuesday night (Oct. 6), about 300 guests at the Théâtre Daunou, in Paris’ 2nd arrondissement, had come for Telfar Clemens’ first show in Europe since September 2019. The opener, whom Dazed identified as the French DJ Crystallmess, walked out in a hooded snow-leopard minidress, then stopped to answer a ringing phone. On the giant screen behind her was Clemens. The collection was walking in New York, and Paris was watching it on a livestream.

The real runway cut through the ornate lobby of a former bank at One Hanson Place in downtown Brooklyn, lined with racks from the brand’s biggest sample sale yet: more than 30,000 garments and bags, according to WWD. The night also launched Bag Redemption, a program that lets fans trade in old Telfar bags, no matter how worn. Before the first look, a voice on the mic spelled out the joke.

So, you know the first two letters of sample sale are S and S, but at Telfar, we’re always ahead so right now you’re getting Telfar SS27.

A voice on the mic before the Brooklyn show, WWD

Clemens told WWD the collection wasn’t built for a runway at all. “We needed to do a sample sale, so we wrapped it all in,” he said, and Paris, where fashion is “a serious deal, serious,” was too good a target to pass up. The point, he added, was the audience.

[W]e took a break from so many of the fashion weeks because it felt performative and wasn’t for people we actually wanted the shows to be for. The people who actually buy our clothes and that resonate with us.

Telfar Clemens, WWD

He sold the ruse hard. The night before the show, Clemens and his longtime creative partner, Babak Radboy, played along by saying they were Zooming in late from Paris after a long day, Vogue reported. “I’ve been lying to the press for a day, and I don’t lie at all,” Clemens admitted to WWD afterward.

It’s the purest version of the Telfar idea. The label is 21 years old and still independent, per Vogue, and it built a cult around its Shopping Bag, the so-called “Bushwick Birkin,” by refusing to make it exclusive, as The FADER points out. Fashion’s biggest week got a seat in the theater; Brooklyn got the show. Vogue called the stunt “a meta-commentary on the way the fashion system works,” and the show notes, rolled up inside a Telfar-branded newspaper, said it in one line: “If you can’t determine value, you are determined by it.”

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As for the clothes, the collection is titled “SS,” and Clemens described it to Vogue as a more “mature” vision. It opened on tailoring. The suits are reversible, with linings that match the silks of the dress shirts, he told WWD, before things got stranger: blazers and trousers worn inside out, colored denim, snake and leopard prints made by dragging skins across office scanners, a deconstructed “Skew-T” and sweats cut like moto gear. “It’s like if you squint in a metropolitan city, you’ll see this look—it’s red wine at six in the morning,” he told Vogue.

Even the bags were in on the bit. There’s a faux-fur foxtail, a scrunch style Clemens calls a “grown-up version of our plastic bag,” and a Triangle bag due next year. One page of the show-notes newspaper carried the line “I’m more than a bag,” per The Zoe Report. Watch the full stream below.

TELFAR 2027 PARIS RUNWAYTELFAR · Watch on YouTube ↗

Clemens called this moment “kind of like a rebirth” for the brand, and he was clear about who the show was for. “It’s really for Brooklyn; it’s great that Paris got to see it too, and I hope the rest of the world got to see it at the same time.”