On 6 October, Telfar presented its SS 2027 collection in Brooklyn and Paris on the same day, a show held in the middle of its sample sale and screened in the French capital. At the centre, a suit that can be worn inside out: the idea holds if the inside is as carefully made as the outside.
On Tuesday 6 October, at 11 a.m. in New York and 5 p.m. in Paris, Telfar showed its SS 2027 collection in two places: One Hanson Place in Brooklyn, and 7 rue Daunou, in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement. According to the text released by the brand, the New York show took place during its sample sale, where guests were invited to shop for free by exchanging old bags, with the queue starting at midnight. It was then screened in Paris. The brand itself frames the outcome as a question: having deprived 300 Parisians of a show, or brought 500 Brooklynites to their first Paris Fashion Week. Both figures are Telfar’s own, with no indication of what they count.
A suit that turns inside out
The garment carrying the collection is the suit, which the brand treats as a convention: it can designate the person who owns the building as readily as the one who works in it. Telfar therefore offers a reversible version, in plain black or grey checked blended virgin wool: short jackets, classic or zoot, balloon or straight trousers with a slit at the hem, raw-hem skirts in mid-length or ankle length, mid-calf breeches and an African wrap short. The inside is finished like an outside, with linings, bias bindings and curtains in branded silk jacquard, double buttons and hidden pockets, to the point, the brand writes, of never wanting to wear them the “right” way round.
The torn-out linings are then used to cut funnel-neck shirts, oversized shirt dresses and open-back halters, with raw edges that reveal threads of 100% silk jacquard. In the evening, snake and leopard prints, taken from skins run through a desktop scanner and reworked so that spots and scales mask the House’s mark, cover lightweight shirts with pearl buttons. Next come piece-dyed rib and cotton basics, including the “Cross-T”, a flat cross-shaped form that can be worn in any direction, and the “Skew-T”, a nod to the “212” era when long T-shirts were tucked in crooked to reach one’s pager.
Leather made with ink
The “Sharkskin” denim, slightly iridescent in red, purple, green and black, comes as knee-length cuffed skinny jeans and drawstring barrel jeans. The Orchard Street bombers, adorned by the “inkstress” Cake, replace leather with cracked-ink T-shirts and grey trapunto fleece. The brand specifies that making “leather” from T-shirt ink costs as much as the real thing, without giving a figure. Printed sweatshirts, turned inside out then brushed, become cashmere cardigans and trousers; others, worn, yield a moto jacket and moto trousers.
In its collection note, Telfar sets out the guiding line: “If you can’t determine the value, you are determined by it.” That is the criterion to keep. A reversible suit, a leather made of ink, cashmere drawn from a sweatshirt: each piece shifts the question from price to making. What the file does not allow us to judge is how these ideas hold up, for lack of garments or images examined here. The brand, moreover, leaves open whether the staging illuminates or distracts from the collection.
One bag remains, mentioned in the last line, planned for next year and not yet unveiled by the brand: it will tell whether these material choices also hold for its most identified object.
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