The Singer Kelela on Her Favorite Possession

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/t-magazine/kelela-telfar-clemens-tote-bag.html

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In this series for T, Emily Spivack, the author of “Worn Stories,” interviews creative types about their most prized possessions. Here, the itinerant singer and songwriter Kelela explains how a bag from her friend, the 2017 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award-winning designer Telfar Clemens, buoys her when she’s on the move.

I don’t live anywhere right now. I have stuff in a storage unit in London and some bags and boxes at my label in L.A. I am nomadic. Because I’m traveling and moving, I’m on a constant quest for things that make moving around easier.

This bag has made my life so much easier. It’s huge, and fits everything when I travel. And it kind of hugs you, so it’s a comfort thing.

What I love most is that one of my favorite designers, who also happens to be a friend, Telfar Clemens, designed it and gave it to me. I first met Telfar when he was D.J.ing about five or six years ago in New York. He played a go-go version of that Ashlee Simpson song “Pieces of Me.” I shot up out of my seat and ran over to the D.J. booth. I was shook. I asked, “How do you know this?” and we discovered that we were both from the D.C. area — from Gaithersburg, Md. specifically — and grew up about seven minutes away from each other. It really blew my mind.

Since then we’ve been admiring and supporting each other, growing alongside each other. Looking at where we started and where we ended up, we feed off one other. Last year, when we were home for Thanksgiving, we got together, and that feeling of driving through all your old parts with someone you relate to now as an adult was incredible.

Even if he wasn’t my friend, it would be important to support a black designer who has been grinding for a long time, and who is killing it. I love that using this bag — which is grounding and a constant as I carry my life around with me — is a functional way to do that.

This interview has been edited and condensed.