Following the bestselling Bushwick Birkin, Telfar Clemens’s new plastic bag, with graphics bastardised from classic New York bodega bags, offers the same ubiquity
The designer Telfar Clemens has a rare thing in fashion – a sense of humour. Telfar has collaborated with Ugg and, in 2021, launched a shopping channel: Telfar TV to sell its wares. Today, the brand releases a new product – a plastic bag, the follow-up to its best-selling 2014 Shopping bag, colloquially known as the ‘Bushwick Birkin’ and itself modelled on the dimensions of Bloomingdale’s shopping bags. Or rather, Telfar is launching a collection of plastic bags, the type used to tote shopping home from bodegas or take-out restaurants that were banned in New York in 2020. Obviously, Telfar has reworked and redesigned the bags from their humble origins – now executed in nylon (which technically is still plastic) with a ruched handle and multiple interior pockets. But they still borrow the shape and styling of their antecedents, with graphics bastardised from classic New Yorker designs – emblazoned with smiley faces, ‘Thank you for shopping here!’, or a take on the I-heart-NYC logo, with the Telfar logo replacing the heart. They promise to have the same ubiquity as his Bushwick Birkin – in actual fact, given their familiarity both to citizens of Manhattan and in wider pop cultural consciousness, they kind of already do. The regular size is priced at $148, while the carry-on scaled ‘Jumbo’ costs $195. As Telfar deadpans – “that’s right. For a plastic bag.”
The Telfar Plastic Bag is available in Liquor Store, Flower, OMG, Thank You, Smiley Face, Nude, Olive and New York in regular and jumbo sizes now.
