Telfar SS27 Reminds Us Why It's NYC's Favorite Brand
Bringing Paris Fashion Week to Brooklyn, the label gave the community full access to the runway this season.
Telfar Clemens has always understood something fundamental about New York City: the real fashion isn’t happening behind closed doors on Wall Street and Midtown skyscrapers, but on the pavement outside. For Spring/Summer 2027, the label turns corporate convention inside out, subverting standard office tailoring and streetwear to ask a crucial question: who determines value?
After tricking the masses into believing he was leaving the city to show in Paris this season, Clemens brought the runway to Brooklyn. Coinciding with the opening of the brand’s massive sample sale, the city’s favorite brand made fashion democratic and community-based again.
Opening the show with a sharp critique of the suit, the collection strips away traditional formality. Tailoring comes re-engineered for the street, constructed with inside-out finishings that demand to be worn wrong.
As the daytime grind fades into night, office attire makes way for wilder instincts that are true to Telfar’s aesthetic. Wild skins were dragged across office scanners to create pixelated, camouflaged leopard and snake prints across gauzy shirts and baby tees. Architectural T-shirts — a Telfar staple — take center stage, including a symmetric “Cross-T” shaped like a plus sign that can be worn in any direction, and a “Skew-T” referencing early 2000s New York pager culture.
Telfar’s most radical experiment lies in its material choices. Realizing that creating “leather” textures out of screenprint ink costs just as much as authentic leather, the brand leaned into the subversion: brushing out inside-out fleece to create cashmere-grade cardigans and converting worn-in sweats into padded, moto-ready armor.
The presentation closed under a blackout, introducing a floor-length wool blanket-coat with varsity sleeves — a perfect anchor for the metallic, chain-trimmed underpinnings underneath. And, in true Telfar fashion, a mystery bag silhouette peeked through the lineup, set for release next year without much else to go off of. Telfar is the only brand that always keeps us on our toes.
