Telfar collaborates with FAKA for Serpentine Galleries Performance

CULTURE

A NIGHT AT SERPENTINE GALLERIES WITH TELFAR

WORDS

by KRISTOPHER FRASER

PHOTOGRAPHS

by LAYO MUSSI & LEWIS RONALD

CFDA/Vogue Fashion winner Telfar Clemens of his namesake label Telfar hopped across the pond to London to take over Serpentine Galleries. On Friday August 10, as part of an ongoing music project, the genderless New York-based fashion line collaborated with South African group FAKA for a performance at Serpentine Galleries in their new pavilion at Kensington Park, designed by architect Frida Escobedo. Titled “TELFAR, NOT FOR YOU FOR EVERYONE”, the evening was part of Park Nights, Serpentine Galleries’ annual series of experimental, interdisciplinary commission in the Pavilion presented by COS for the sixth year.

For the performance, FAKA composed an original set of music performed acapella with a choir of their peers from the London music scene. All performers were dressed in pieces from the Telfar spring/summer 2019 collection. The performance took place inside the pavilion where spectators looked in with a lion’s cage perspective.

Telfar staged a performance at the Serpentine Gallery

“This FAKA performance is like a part three to our TELFAR 2018 World Tour. We worked with them to kick off the tour in Milan in January, after that performance we really wanted to expand on the experience we had with them, and build on the concert experience we had in NYC during New York Fashion Week,” Clemens said. “We have followed FAKA a long time and we reached out to do a show together for Milan Mens at Spazio Maiocchi — and we were so happy to find out they had been watching us too. Serpentine was maybe 50 percent an excuse just to get together again since we live so far apart with them in Johannesburg and us in NYC.”

Since the brand’s inception in 2005, the black-owned fashion label has worked to forge lines of communication and commerce outside of the traditional fashion system through events, images, products, performances and collaborations emphasizing a politics of presence and power beyond “inclusivity,” and a collectivism with individuality. Telfar will be debuting its next collection at New York Fashion Week on September 9.

TELFAR CLEMENS

Photo by Ari Macropolous

Launching his eponymous line in 2005 at the age of 18, Liberian-American unisex prodigy Telfar Clemens has developed with remarkable fidelity, a brand and a design vocabulary which is uniquely democratic and strikingly original. Laying the blue print for today's black avant-garde, Telfar was genderless a decade before the trend. After winning the 2017 Vogue/CFDA Fashion Fund, Telfar is poised to take his place in America's fashion future.

www.telfar.net

– Telfar Clemens–

serpentine galleries park nights telfar, not for you for everyone photos by lewis ronald