Fashion career profile

Telfar Clemens

Telfar Clemens is a Liberian-American designer whose New York label has developed an accessible, unisex approach to fashion and a recognizable community-led identity. He studied business management at Pace University while already designing clothes, and founded Telfar in 2005 as a student. The label’s stated principle, “Not for you — for everyone,” expresses its challenge to traditional boundaries between luxury, gender and access. Clemens gained wider industry recognition when he won the 2017 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund; Pace University records that he invested the award in production of the Telfar Shopping Bag, which became a central part of the label’s public identity. The CFDA describes him as self-taught in fashion and notes his Queens upbringing, but Pace documents his university studies and business-management degree; these accounts describe different kinds of training rather than contradicting one another. This profile treats Telfar as both a designer-led label and a broader cultural project, while keeping the designer’s education and the brand’s accessible product strategy grounded in institutional and first-party sources.

Role
Founder & Designer, Telfar
Nationality
Liberian-American
Age
41
Verified awards
2