SHOULD THE “NOT FOR YOU – FOR EVERYONE” BRAND REALLY BE.. FOR EVERYONE?
When Telfar Clemens, 35, debuted his reinvented TELFAR “Shopping Bag” in 2017, he turned the entire fashion community on its head. Finally, among the likes of mega luxury houses such as Louis Vuitton and Dior, here was a young, queer and Black-led brand ready to infiltrate the chronically expensive fashion space and democratize it with the release of a single accessory.
But is the “Bushwick Birkin” really for everyone? Unfortunately, this is a question that the Black community is often subjected to say yes to concerning cultural phenomena such as TELFAR. It’s a weird feeling – on the one hand, why wouldn’t we want to see white people making Black people richer? I love that. On the other, however, it feels as if someone keeps using my toys at recess even though they are clearly marked with my name, or in this case, “T C.” As we continue to push for our white and non-Black counterparts to advocate for Black lives through the support of Black-owned businesses, we must answer the question, no matter how much we think it matters (or doesn’t), whether it’s necessary to “gatekeep” such brands that have significant cultural ties to our communities.
In 2005, Clemens launched TELFAR, a unisex brand based in New York City, at just 19 years old. The vegan leather, tote-style Shopping Bag that we know today originally made its debut during the brand’s Fall/Winter 2014 collection.
“I remember designing it around the holiday time and seeing people walking down the street with a million shopping bags and thinking how cool that looked as a silhouette,” Clemens told Vogue in 2018. “If you consider it as a look or an accessory, it’s suddenly this handbag that women are wearing, men, babies—everyone—and everyone looks great with it!”
Even though the initial launch was a success, it would take winning the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund in 2017 to bring TELFAR to the level of success at which it is today. The Fashion Fund, established shortly after 9/11, is an annual grant program that supports up-and-coming American fashion designers. Granted a monetary gift of $400K, Clemens made his first move: reimagine the Shopping Bag, or “make it right,” as he has said in previous interviews. By 2019, TELFAR had generated more than $2M in revenue, nearly 20 times more than the brand’s revenue in 2016.
Surprisingly, TELFAR maintained its unique ability to stay within the communities it started in up until 2020. Before the Shopping Bag ever made it onto the shoulders of Bella Hadid or the random white girl on your college dorm floor, it was worn in supermarkets and shopping malls, at apartment parties and scattered throughout bars on the weekend, on the way to run errands – everywhere. During that time, the “everyone” in TELFAR’s motto meant everyone who wasn’t them; in other words, the marginalized who wanted a piece of luxury for them, by them, at an affordable price.
The dilemma escalated when bags began selling out, a scenario that has now somewhat become a part of the brand’s identity and forward momentum. Suddenly, the Black and Brown folks who had been purchasing bags since 2014 were now in competition with re-sellers, bots and everyone else who wanted in on the latest craze. To remedy this, Clemens introduced the Bag Security Program in 2020.
“The whole point of the Shopping Bag was accessibility and community, which is why there was so much demand,” said Babak Radboy, Clemens’ business partner and creative director of TELFAR. “But then we got to the point where most of the people who wanted the bag couldn’t get it, and we couldn’t get any idea of how many people that was.”
The Bag Security Program offered a simple solution. By asking customers to preorder, Clemens and Radboy were able to reverse engineer the actual demand of their product, enabling them to scale production appropriately and sustainably for future drops.
Despite Clemens’ newly-established preorder program and crack down on bots and re-sellers, the question remains: should non-Black people, specifically white people, wear TELFAR bags? Even if their monetary support has elevated the brand to its current height, as some contend, it isn’t easy to brush off the idea that many of these contributions were made in support of a trend and not the brand’s Black owner or the Black community in general. Additionally, supposing that a black-owned brand cannot survive without the monetary support of a non-Black customer base is simply untrue.
Monetary concerns aside, TELFAR has grown to become a culturally significant brand within the Black community, which is why so many of us have pondered this same question. Seeing that “T C” branded on the side of a passerby’s bag is a sign of inclusivity, connection. These interactions build a mutual understanding that this bag is for us, and whether you own one or not, it feels good to know that someone else within the community has secured their piece of luxury.
Of course, Mr. Clemens is not going to put a Census-like check-the-box in TELFAR order forms to ensure that everyone who buys a bag is Black. It’s not his fault that everyone wants in on the accessory of the decade. Nevertheless, we have all seen time and again how trends that begin within the Black community make their way into the hands of white people; then they are gone forever. Maybe we don’t have to go so far as to “gatekeep,” but certainly continue to support TELFAR through the means that we can so it doesn’t experience the cultural demise that other Black-owned businesses have experienced due to white infiltration.