Babak Radboy is an artist based in NYC. He is Artistic Director of the unisex media and fashion brand TELFAR and works on a range of projects at the intersection of communications and social practice.
Telfar Clemens, born in Queens New York, is a Liberian American fashion designer. Self trained, he began making clothes as a teenager, frustrated by the starkly gendered and normative nature of commercially available clothes. He sold his own designs first to middle school classmates, then in downtown boutiques before launching his eponymous line in 2004 at the age of 18. His design DNA has been consistent from his first collection — applying methodologies of formal deconstruction to the social meaning of clothes; collapsing signifiers of gender, class, taste and race from a perspective distinctly removed from European luxury. Telfar would be concertedly marginalized by the fashion industry for his first ten years of operation. The constant innovations Telfar employed in the face of this marginalization, and later his tokenization — have formed around him a community a set of practices and a business incomparable to anything in the industry.