Telfar Clemens: No Man is An Island
An Interview With the Designer, On Location in Paradise
- Photography: Torso
- Text: Sophia Al-Maria and TELFAR INC.
Imagine a small Caribbean island called Saint Remy. Imagine that it is named after a Viceroy in Sardinia—made famous by a dream from which he awoke in terror, one April 300 years ago today.
The sight is defiant:
Telfar Clemens riding bareback in an asymmetrical mesh top: red, black and gold. His khaki trousers split from thigh to ankle, clinging to his horse as it struggles onto the sandbank. Behind him the cruise ship Capital Empress, dominates the horizon—just as it dominates our conversation.
I’ve come to the little-known island to interview the New York designer on location as he shoots his SS20 campaign. Then, like the Capital Empress and countless others around the world, we found ourselves stranded.
“You shall not pass!” Telfar screams, shaking his fist at the mega-liner, as the photographer laughs, nearly dropping his camera in the water.
I want to ask Telfar about the rumors I’ve heard in the six weeks we’ve been stuck here. Why it took him this long to grant my interview. Who made the decision to stop the Capital Empress after she was initially given permission to dock. How the island will survive when it is all but owned by the cruise line whose order it has defied—and the far-fetched stories I’ve heard from locals about the history of this place.
“I don’t fuck much with history,” Telfar replies as he disrobes completely, drying himself with a monogrammed towel. “I fuck with the future.”
Saint Remy’s dream was about a plague which came by ship and destroyed his island home. When he awoke that morning, a vessel had appeared on the horizon. Saint Remy gave an insane order: refuse safe harbor under threat of cannon fire. Some years later, news came back that the ship, having continued on, landed in Marseilles—where it had spread the most horrific plague in the city’s history.
I wait outside a bungalow thinking about what Telfar said, and also about whether the island has enough SPF stockpiled.
Telfar emerges in a pair of oversized pum pums, worn over a very soft-looking surfer shirt—buttonless, but with a collar. Stunning.
“Telfar is known for its legendary shows—pushing the form forward season after season—what do you look for in a walk?”
“I look at the clothes. How they move.”
“What do you look for in a model?”
“They have to look good in the clothes.”
A thoughtful pause.
“And be cool to hang around.”
“Do they hang around alot?”
“Everyone hangs around a lot. That’s what a show is. Except for the 15 minutes when it’s happening. A lot of our models are like family. A lot of our team is like family. Actually a lot of our team is actually family.”
Telfar points at a figure chewing grass by the bike path.
“Hi. Are you a bull or a cow?” he teases, striding up to it brandishing a large oxblood bag like a red flag.
She doesn’t charge.
This bizarre tale of communication between an island saint and a catarrhic virus was exhumed from the archives of the tiny Sardinian town by the French refussé Antonin Artaud, forming the opening scene of his hallucinogenic essay The Theatre and the Plague. This is no doubt where the founder of Saint Remy—Brother Ali Emangalisayo—would have encountered it.
Later, when we take our seats for lunch, beachside at the cafe, there’s only one thing I want to know:
“What’s in the bag?”
“Just a little light beach reading,” Telfar chortles. “They’re props from the shoot.”
Telfar fishes Assata: An Autobiography out first. “I saw a picture of Indya Moore reading it in the bath on Instagram!”
I don’t mention the irony that in the book he is holding, Assata is reading James Baldwin on the beach just like this, in the Caribbean, or that James Baldwin wrote the title to the next book he produces from the bag.
“If we think Negroes smell bad, we are ignorant of the fact that anywhere but in Europe it is we whites who 'smell bad.' And I would even say that we give off an odor as white as the gathering of pus in an infected wound.” — A.A., The Theatre and the Plague
Telfar turns his back to me and reads If They Come in the Morning, by Angela Yvonne Davis.
As the photographer’s assistant applies double-stick tape to the flapping pages, I sit back and admire the knitwork of Telfar’s polo.
Posing the plague as a rebellion of the body against society and a metaphor for revolution—Artaud’s near total disaffection from civilization made him a rare historical ally for Black radical thinkers like Amiri Baraka whose concept of revolutionary theatre was inspired by Artaud.
After we’ve had a nap we are joined for a pre-dinner swim by the winner of the local beauty pageant Miss Universe Saint Remy.
She is wearing the same asymmetrical “string vest” Telfar wore horseback, but red, green, black and down below her knees. I can see her bikini through the loose knit.
When we’re introduced it’s “Dr. Universe.”
I must say I’m impressed.
“She’s a gynecologist by day and solar farmer by night…and a model!” Telfar jokes.
“I’m afraid he’s not kidding.”
“You should run for president!” I enthuse.
The doctor and Telfar suddenly grow cold, returning to the shoot they wave at the drone operated camera circling above.
Housekeeping stopped showing up after the third week. Restaurants, shops and schools are closed. Gangs of local children play in the palatial common areas of the hotel resort where we are shooting.
Miss Universe and Telfar descend the stairs, twinning in them-and-theirs cargo-denim hybrid shorts. Telfar wears his with a white tee embellished with cargo pocket sleeves. Wow.
When he reaches the courtyard, he greets each child by name before turning to me. He talks at length about the itinerary of the days-long shoot—a campaign that seems to be going on indefinitely.
“Do you ever want to go back?” I venture.
“Back where?”
It is through Baraka, whose early plays Brother Ali financed, that he first encountered the figure of Saint Remy. An Entrepreneur of Black Nationalism influenced as much by Marcus Garvey and Ayn Rand, Emangalisayo founded Saint Remy as a Black island utopia—and a refuge from “the fire next time” that had already began to engulf American cities as race riots broke out following the assassination of Martin Luther King in the summer of '68.
He notes that this place is full of luxury accommodation and no one to rent it.
This fantasy of a luxury squatter’s colony reminds one of the brand’s slogan: “Not for you, for everyone.”
But the mood is still uneasy.
“Will the government grant you amnesty?”
“What government?” Telfar lets loose a smoky laugh.
And for the first time I realise:
I haven’t seen a single police car on Saint Remy.
There were no border guards on arrival at the docks at Baraka Bay.
I didn’t need a visa or even a passport to check in to the Palm Heights Hotel...
There aren’t even embassies on Embassy Boulevard!
Just unfinished buildings and a head shop.
What I’m saying is: Saint Remy has no unnatural borders...only wet ones.
“Then who turned the Capital Empress away?”
“Me,” juts Miss Saint Remy Universe, laughing from her pool chair. “I don’t believe in borders, but I am really into boundaries!”
“I thought this was supposed to be about the collection,” Telfar reminds me gently.
What it became was a theme park version of Black liberation—available to those who could afford the price of admission. Some of its central tenets were truly well-intentioned—envisioned as experimental transitions from capitalism. Visitors would pay for time rather than space. What began as a revolutionary reimagining of private property became the prototype of the modern "time-share".
She and Telfar lean out over the balcony. Telfar wears a Budweiser wrap shirt with drawstrings at the wrists and waist. Miss Universe is in black boot-cut jeans, her breasts covered with a scarf.
“What is the difference between a sickness and a plague?” Miss Saint Remy Universe muses thoughtfully, answering her own question: “A sickness is a revolt against the body. A plague is a revolt against society.”
“What's the difference between affection and infection?” Telfar retorts—suddenly kissing me on the mouth.
It is big and deep and I feel many, many things. Doctor Universe punches Telfar in the chest—playfully, but very hard.
After a series of lawsuits and bitter ideological disputes among its partners—Emangalisayo left the venture and went on to make millions selling time-shares to a decidedly counter-revolutionary clientele around the Caribbean—leaving the island largely abandoned a few short years after its founding.
The smell of BBQ smoke draws us down to Tillie’s.
When I arrive Telfar is pretending to debone a large fish for the camera. There’s no tourists in sight. The staff and their extended families mingle with Telfar’s crew. Foil catering containers litter the tables.
Telfar and the doctor finally join me at my table.
Telfar is wearing a black halter top, exposing his back, and black denim pants constructed to look like jeans sagging off a pair of boxer briefs. The trade.
I want to ask them both a thousand questions.
I want the gossip.
And I really want another kiss.
But we are interrupted by the fish, and we are all starving.
“It’s a prop from the photoshoot,” Telfar explained. “Just like in the bible.”
“Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men” —Matthew 4:18-21
After supper, we stroll along the boardwalk. A row of shuttered bungalows on a street called Clemens’ Cove.
“Is this place named after you?”
“I’m not even named after me,” he mumbles.
We stand in the empty street, the sound of the cruise ship’s speakers echo off the “abandoned” vacation home—full of property staff and their friends having a house party. A grand piano is being dragged out of the parlour and onto the deck by the pool.
I notice no one is swimming.
“No one who actually lives here has ever been in a pool.”
Today Saint Remy resembles any other Caribbean tourist trap. Save a few descendants of its original staff, its history is mostly forgotten. Without an airport its economy is entirely dependent on its position along cruise lines who effectively own the island. In fact, Freedom House International reports the “terra nullius” status of the island and the monopoly power of the cruise lines leaves its permanent residents with a near total lack of representation.
What will fashion be like after the crisis? What are your plans for SS21? Have you had to make any lay-offs? Have you read about MMT? Were you planning to vote in the 2020 elections? Could this be a good thing, you know, for the environment, like nature is kind of saying—wake up! Right?
In the distance I hear a sound like gunfire, probably a car backfiring on the wharf.
The ox moos from somewhere beyond the bike path.
The report claims: The complete absence of rights, laws and norms of governance—is so thorough that they represent a risk to the whole of the Caribbean. In the interest of short-term profit—the visionary utility of liberal rights should not be forgotten: the guarantees which protect the residents of Saint Remy today, will in truth protect the security of investors and governments for generations to come.
Telfar nods in agreement, “For some of us, social distancing is going to mean coming closer together... farther apart.” And he lets that hang in the air like a riddle.
I’m left there at a crossroads, outside a party I’m not invited to.
I am waiting, hoping the rest of the world gets a taste of this infectious affection.
Sophia Al-Maria is a writer currently based in Saint Remy. She is a regular contributor to Extravaganza, Qatar Airways’ Inflight Magazine and Fodors.
- Photography: Torso
- Text: Sophia Al-Maria and TELFAR INC.
- Styling Assistant: Greg Miller
- Featuring: Kadejah Bodden, Miss Cayman Universe and Chef Jake Brodsky
- Location: Palm Heights Grand Cayman
- Special Thanks To: Gerardo Gonzalez, Raul Lopez, the entire Palm Heights crew.
- Date: April 29, 2020
