BEFORE SITTING TO breakfast one morning earlier this year, Tremaine Emory moved cautiously through his airy Tribeca loft to put on a record. With each step toward the turntable, the metallic clank of his Lofstrand crutch echoed through the apartment. After he dropped the needle and the music began to play, he made his way to a big table in the middle of the room and took a seat. Emory was dressed cozy in a mostly unbuttoned shirt, flannel pants, and a pair of all-black Hokas. He wore a Martine Rose cap, bill to the back.
"It's been a fucking journey, man," he said. "It's been a war. The second-hardest thing I've ever dealt with, next to my mom dying."
As the melodies of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers drifted around us, Emory told me about his year. It's been a remarkable one. After a while, the music would fade and the record would spin in silence, and his words would continue, filling the space between us with the story of his epic year of struggle and triumph.
If you've read anything about Emory in the last few months, chances are you might be surprised to know that the war the celebrated. fashion designer was describing had little to do with the headlines he'd made this year, or the discourse he'd sparked in the worlds of fashion and art about systemic racism. It had nothing to do with Supreme, the streetwear behemoth, where he'd served as its first-ever publicly confirmed creative director until a bitter split in August ended his 18-month tenure and nothing to do with his public criticism of the company and the discourse that still circulates online and offline about the gatekeeping of Black creativity.
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