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.
The war that Emory waged was more specific, more dangerous, and ultimately more transformative than his time at Supreme. It’s a battle he’ll likely keep waging for the rest of his life. And it began on an otherwise pleasant fall night last year, with a sudden and excruciating pain that he felt radiating along an unfamiliar path within his body, directly behind his heart.
Autumn in New York is a time of aching contradictions—a sweetness born of chill and change. As the song goes, it’s a time marked by the promise of new love, often mingled with pain. In 2022, that dissonance surrounded Emory’s first autumn back in Lenape land after a dozen years away.
His grassroots fashion journey had by then become the stuff of lore. After growing up in Jamaica, Queens, in the ’80s and ’90s, he’d worked his way up at Marc Jacobs from a retail job in downtown Manhattan to a management position in London, where he began to emcee parties with his DJ friend Acyde (a.k.a. Ade Odunlami) and, later on, the music exec Brock Korsan, under the handle No Vacancy Inn—gatherings that attracted the likes of Frank Ocean and the late fashion trailblazer Virgil Abloh. In 2016, Kanye West hired him at Yeezy, where he would become brand director.
All the while, a core component of Emory’s rise in fashion was his abiding interest in sparking conversation with people—what he often calls “locking in.” Whether it’s designing a Black Jesus sweatshirt to re-create discussions he’d had on the streets of early ’00s Queens or sharing an MF Doom lyric to spark debate at a function, Emory has long been focused on the exchange of provocative ideas, especially around Black history and culture. His voice is slightly nasal, vowels elongated by a New York childhood. He sprinkles conversations with vintage bars from Nas, Yasiin Bey, and Jay-Z. He remembers details about new acquaintances and, unintentionally, surprises them with this. He’s often quick with a retort to strangers, punctuating witty comebacks with a booming staccato laugh.
In 2019, he founded the cerebral African-diaspora sportswear line Denim Tears, whose most recent release of 30,000 cotton-wreath-adorned sweatsuits sold out in 15 minutes. “I just want to see the cotton wreath, that symbol, that form, spread as far as possible into popular culture,” Emory said of the brand’s signature design, which was inspired by a post on the artist Kara Walker’s Instagram page. “Because every time someone wears it, there’s another chance for conversation and discourse about the state of Black people, the state of America, the state of the world.”
But Emory’s designs at Denim Tears avoid overt messaging. The cotton wreaths are easily mistaken for large flowers, and the indigo handprints that highlighted Denim Tears’ second collaboration with Levi’s were inspired by Julie Dash’s 1991 masterpiece, Daughters of the Dust, a film that touches on the indigo trade. To understand the thought and research behind Denim Tears clothing requires the kind of curiosity and bookishness that Emory, who studied film at community college before dropping out, layers onto everything he releases. Denim Tears vibrates with backstory, though not at the expense of irreverent and soulful surfaces. “I wanna start uncomfortable conversations,” Emory explained of his aim for the label.
“I don’t agree with all the things that people say or feel about the brand, but I like that there’s discourse. When the brand stops causing discourse, I’m gonna shut it down.”
By the looks of it, he may be a long way from shutting anything down. An eerie thing started to happen while I began meeting with Emory this year: I started seeing cotton wreaths everywhere. On a young brother on the train. On the rack of a Harlem boutique. On an Afrobeats star’s selfie. Maybe I hadn’t been paying close enough attention before, or maybe 2023 was the year that Denim Tears, already enshrined in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute for a remix of Ralph Lauren and collaborations with Ugg and Levi’s, was becoming a staple of global fashion. As one recent meme put it, “Denim Tears done hit the streets harder than crack in the 80s.”
It was on account of the breakout success of Denim Tears—as far as Emory understands—that Supreme had sought him out. When I asked him why he thought the streetwear giant, founded in 1994 by James Jebbia, had wanted him to be creative director, he responded bluntly: “Clout.” After being acquired in 2020 by the North Face parent company VF Corp in an industry-shaking $2.1 billion deal, Supreme appointed Emory in February of 2022 to work alongside Jebbia to steer the label into a new era. Supreme and VF Corp’s failure to hit financial targets since the acquisition had been widely documented, a backstory that seemed to frame a narrative tension between corporate turnaround and an authentic desire for change. At the time, Emory seemed to be focused on the latter.
“I came in very pragmatic,” he said of his ambitions at Supreme. “The brand is an important heritage brand. It’s not what it once was to young people or to culture. I came to bring it back to top of class. That’s what I came to do with them.”
Emory’s practice as a designer and his relationships in the art world had made him an appealing choice: A key aspect of Supreme’s three decades of success has been its long history of collections with contemporary visual artists. Among the first artists Emory engaged for Supreme was video artist and found-photography collagist Arthur Jafa, winner of the Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale. “Sometimes, people try to put a name on your relationship with a person,” Jafa told me of his work with Emory, including the collaboration at Supreme. “‘Oh, you’re collaborators. Oh, you’re peers. Oh, you’re this or you’re that.’ To me, it’s really all about, just—association. And exchange, in a very jazz-like sense.”
Ennobled by Supreme’s track record of provocation and rabble-rousing, Emory shepherded a collection with Jafa based on the artist’s I Don’t Care About Your Past, I Just Want Our Love to Last, a 2018 diptych featuring an archival photograph of a group of white men in 1919 posing, some smiling, around the shirtless corpses of three lynched African American men. That image of graphic violence is counterposed with a photograph of a group of African American gang members posing with rifles and handguns. “What’s A.J. saying?” Emory explained. “He’s saying, ‘This gets you this.’”
But, according to Emory, it was the archival photograph of the lynching that gave people at Supreme pause, including two Black staff members who raised concerns that Emory discussed with them one-on-one—concerns that, in truth, none of us would have known about if not for Emory.
“This is a picture that existed. A.J. didn’t paint this picture,” Emory said. “He took a picture that existed. They made postcards of lynchings, and the country tried to forget about it. A.J.’s trying to reinsert it to create tension to talk about it. And Supreme refused to have discourse [with me] about it. It’s not about whether they are putting out the images or not, it’s about having discourse about it.”
As he worked on the Jafa collaboration into the fall of 2022, Emory found himself more in the public eye than ever before—and busier than ever. There was the rancor of a confrontation with Kanye West on Instagram that saw Emory standing up to his former Yeezy boss for West’s treatment of Abloh, their mutual friend, in the months before the designer succumbed to a mostly private battle with a rare form of heart cancer. Meanwhile, Denim Tears was on the cusp of announcing a new collection with Dior, one of its biggest collaborations to date. The ambitious project, Dior Tears, would release in the summer of 2023 and pay homage to 20th-century Black American expatriates in France who fled stateside racism, like Miles Davis and James Baldwin. Emory commissioned a sumptuous short film set in Egypt, reputed for its ancient history of cotton production, millennia before it became the foundation of America’s 19th-century economy.
The sweetness of new love was also entering Emory’s life that fall. He had just begun dating a colleague at Supreme, Andee McConnell, who was brought on just before Emory and started working closely with him. “Most people kind of pick up on that big, warm, fuzzy energy no matter who you are to him,” McConnell says of their first meeting. The two clicked immediately—a conversation-oriented duo hoping to usher in a new era at the company.
On matters personal and professional, Emory and McConnell seemed to be in lockstep, spending more time together outside of the office in electric conversations about life and work, but keeping their new love a secret at Supreme. “We always used to say, It’s got to be our molecules or something that are just fusing together,” McConnell said. Within the larger miracle of love, there was a specific miracle in the fact that McConnell and Emory were together that autumn night when something terrible started to happen inside his chest. They had just returned from listening to jazz at a nearby spot when, soon after midnight, Emory doubled over in agony, clutching at his back and short of breath. At first, McConnell thought it might be a heart attack, but when his breathing settled and the pain in his upper back slightly relented, she speculated that it might be a muscle spasm from stress. She rubbed his back, ran a hot shower over him, drew him a bath.
While he was still in the bath, his legs went numb. McConnell recalled: “That’s when we called 9-1-1.”
The aorta is the largest blood vessel in the body. Your heart appears to almost hang from it—the word aorta comes from the Greek: “to hang”—like a flower too heavy for its stem. Even now, as you read this, blood pumps constantly through your aorta—traveling via an elaborate ductwork of arteries to nourish organs, fingers, eyes, brain, before circulating back toward the heart in a life-sustaining process as quiet and perfect as the universe.
The technical term for what happened in Emory’s body that night is an aortic dissection. It’s a medical nightmare, as rare as it is lethal. Nineteen-eighties sitcom star John Ritter died of one, as do an estimated 13,000 people in the United States each year. Back in the day, doctors used to call it the widow maker. The first hours after a tear in the aorta’s inner lining are the most crucial for survival.
The ambulance pulled to a stop outside the Tribeca building, red lights dancing against the darkness. Here was the promise of relief, answers—the hope of survival. There was a tense moment when McConnell accidentally locked herself out of the apartment with the paramedics, forcing Emory, sopping wet with no feeling in his legs, to crawl across the floor to open the door.
The EMTs began firing questions at him. Was this his apartment? they asked. Had he been doing drugs? Emory was rolled outside to the waiting ambulance in a wheelchair, and during his transfer from the chair to the vehicle, he sustained an injury to his toe. He couldn’t feel anything below his waist, but blood was streaming from the wound. In the hours ahead, the toe would turn gangrenous from lack of blood flow, and eventually its tip fell off.
Part of what makes an aortic tear so lethal is that emergency room doctors often fail to discern the condition, prioritizing more common ailments like heart attack. Relatively young and healthy, Emory was still conscious, still breathing. With McConnell at his side, he waited as medical staff moved them from one hallway to another. The hours passed, the couple lost track of time. Meanwhile, the crisis inside Emory’s body was worsening. According to Emory and McConnell, several hours passed like this before the morning shift rotated on and a Black doctor who saw Emory became alarmed by the numbness in his legs—and an increasing pain in his lower abdomen. “She had a sense of urgency that no one else did,” McConnell recalled. “And the stomach pain seemed to really get it on her radar that she needed to move fast with this guy.”
When results of a CT angiogram returned, highlighting the state of Emory’s vascular system, the intricate weave of blood-carrying arteries, capillaries, and veins, McConnell vividly remembered the doctor’s reaction: “The look on her face was panic inducing.” Scans would reveal that the tear in Emory’s aorta began in his chest and extended down through his pelvis and femoral artery—beyond the edge of the X-ray. What the doctors didn’t say aloud, their actions—suddenly urgent and decisive—filled in the blanks. Within minutes, Emory was in an emergency transport vehicle headed to NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center on the Upper East Side for surgery.
It was at this point, alone in an ambulance racing toward the unknown, that Emory took out his phone and began reaching out to everyone he loved for what he assumed might be the last time.
One of the numbers that Emory texted while racing in the ambulance for emergency surgery belonged to a younger designer named Brick, who, along with partner Du, cofounded the menswear house Bstroy. Both men are close friends and frequent collaborators of Emory’s—up-and-coming leaders of what he and Abloh would often refer to as “our tribe.” Brick was unnerved by the message his mentor sent that October morning. “CALL ME” appeared in all caps. He called Emory back immediately, and when Emory picked up, the blare of an ambulance siren filled the background. “He’s like, ‘Yo, I’m fucked up,’ ” Brick recounted. “ ‘If I don’t make it, y’all know what to do. I got y’all.’ And then just hangs up the phone.”
As Brick remembered the details of that day and the ensuing surgery that dragged on into evening, making everyone begin to lose hope, he was overcome with emotion. He, Du, and I were in a car zooming up the West Side Highway. Brick leaned forward on the seat, his head draped over his folded arms. Du wrapped a consoling arm around his friend and business partner.
Until now, neither had really spoken of this at length.
“Pause, but he was somebody I waited my whole life for, bro,” Brick said through tears. “Tremaine is my friend, my brother, my contemporary, all that type a shit, so when it happened, it hurt in a different way, my n-gga.”
As Emory rushed toward NYP/Weill Cornell hospital, Dr. Christopher Lau, the director of endovascular surgery, was busy studying the scans of Emory’s aortic dissection that had been forwarded. A Brooklyn native and the son of Chinese immigrants, Lau was responsible for making a series of rapid judgments about how the next few hours would go. As often is the case with emergency surgeries like this, the doctor’s analyses had to be impeccable: informed guesses on multiple dimensions. And it all needed to happen very quickly.
Since Lau mostly operates on vessel tears closer to the heart, he knew he was not the best person to handle the extensive tear down Emory’s aorta: He would need the technological savvy of vascular surgeon Dr. Christopher Agrusa, who, over the course of eight hours, painstakingly repaired the inside of the aorta and replaced Emory’s destroyed femoral artery with a Gore-Tex implant to shunt blood across his pelvis.
And maybe most important of all, Lau’s analysis also predicted the damage that would be wreaked on Emory’s body once Agrusa had successfully restored blood flow. Lau could tell from bloodwork that the muscles of Emory’s legs had already begun to decompose—as though he’d actually died—and would begin to poison his organs once blood flow was restored to the legs. Attempting to process the polluted blood, his kidneys would fail, and with them the rest of his organs. For this, Lau readied an aggressive, taxing regimen of dialysis in the ICU that Emory would endure for nearly a month after surgery. The regimen saved both kidneys, although they remain compromised.
Those precious hours of waiting in a downtown ER had put his body in crisis mode. In addition to dialysis, Emory underwent an excruciating surgical procedure known as a fasciotomy, in which deep and long incisions create open wounds in both legs to relieve the pressure as blood flow returns.
Over the course of the next three months in the hospital, Emory would lose 70 pounds, mostly from muscle that fell into disuse. He spent the first five days on a ventilator and the rest of the month hooked to drips and dialysis machines in the ICU. He was in a perpetual state of deep exhaustion, and a bout of sepsis led to intense hallucinations. “It was nuts,” he recalled. Once his condition had stabilized, he was protected from work obligations for over two months, a pause unlike anything he’d experienced, at least since a month-long period he spent recovering from his tenure at Yeezy, a period of rest and reflection that would eventually birth Denim Tears.
When I first expressed interest in speaking with Emory’s father, who was by his side in the ICU almost as much as McConnell, Emory warned me to “clear your day.” Despite an illustrious career as a TV cameraman with multiple Emmy nominations, Tracy Emory has fought to maintain a small-town Georgia sensibility in himself and in his approach to life. When he moved his family to Queens in the early 1980s to become a cameraman for CBS, he and his wife, Sheralyn, didn’t know much about big city living. They’d been childhood sweethearts growing up in a one-traffic-light town not too far outside of Augusta.
Segregated since the legal end of slavery, their community was tied together—racially, geographically, culturally—in a way that was inescapable. “Everybody knew each other, everybody grew up together,” said Tracy. With Tracy and Sheralyn, there was no dating, no meet-cute; they’d known each other their whole lives. Sometime around high school, the two just kind of paired off. “My brain was stimulated by a lot of love,” Tracy told me.
When they moved to New York, that approach to life, work, and spirituality was something the couple made an effort to maintain—only instead of fishing, they took their children sledding, and museum-going, and on excursions to the opera. “There was literally no drama,” Tracy said of the atmosphere he and Sheralyn created at home. “In America, that’s what you do, you take care of your family. That’s it.”
Mostly, taking care of the family meant keeping his three boys safe in New York City during the crack era. Growing up in the rural South, Stay off the chain gang had been the mantra Tracy heard from his elders; it was an ethos that he passed along to his sons in the age of mass incarceration. “Basically,” he said, “I wanted to keep them outta jail.”
Against the threat of police and drug-world violence, Emory and his brothers were given strict curfews, but that could only do so much. Too many of Emory’s neighborhood friends were shot to death. His barber and close friend, Raheem Grays, was killed during an attempted robbery of his barbershop, unlocking a grief that Emory still wears on his head. In the years after Grays’s murder, Emory grew out his hair, unable to sit in another barber’s chair, eventually letting it loc. “He went through a lot of suffering and pain,” his father said of those early years.
For his part, Emory describes his early adulthood with the language of asphyxiation—he felt like he was suffocating in Jamaica. “I know n-ggas that work just as hard as me and ain’t where I’m at,” Emory said. “It ain’t ’cause I’m smarter or better. I’m just luckier than them. And I had Tracy and Sheralyn, and they didn’t.”
When Emory first began experimenting with cotton-wreath designs, Tracy was worried that his son was floundering in fashion. He’d been downsized at Marc Jacobs, then fired as brand director of Yeezy by West—who, Emory says, later asked him to return, unsuccessfully. And he was still grieving the death of his mother, Sheralyn, who passed away from a heart attack just as Emory’s star was beginning to rise in the fashion firmament. “It kinda became the bane of my existence to do something that mattered to honor her,” said Emory. When he showed his father the first samples of the cotton-wreath line, Tracy grew even more worried for his son. “I did not like it,” Tracy recalled. He also sensed that encouragement was more important in that moment than anything. “Tremaine!” Tracy exclaimed. “What a beautiful design!” All the while, he was thinking to himself, Lord, thankfully his bedroom in Queens is still there.
Emory’s success in the fashion world has amazed Tracy, though not as much as his son’s ability to form genuine friendships with people from all walks of life and backgrounds, many of whom Tracy met for the first time in the hospital. “There’s no color barrier,” Tracy said of Emory’s relationships. “He figured out a way to be friends with the world.”
After a month stabilizing in the ICU, overcoming a bout of pneumonia that filled his lungs with fluid, Emory arrived to a room of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell’s Acute Inpatient Rehabilitation unit, where a window overlooked the East River. Here, he would spend the next two months in the care of Dr. Leroy Lindsay and his team of rehabilitation specialists. As a Black doctor in a field underpopulated by Black men—who make up only 3 percent of the doctors in America—Lindsay was excited, if a bit intimidated, by the prospect of caring for a peer. “It’s not often that you get to treat someone so much like yourself,” said Lindsay. “Especially here on the Upper East Side. Both of our families are from the South. We’re literally the same age, same experiences, and we’re both rare in the spaces that we occupy. So I knew he had a long road ahead to recover functionally, physically, and also the grueling psychological road that was before him. And I wanted to make sure that I was taking care of him on all of those fronts.”
In between arduous sessions of physical therapy with Dr. Jaclyn Paler and long stretches alone in a bed, Emory welcomed a constant stream of visitors and well-wishers to that nondescript space. There were artists, like Theaster Gates, a longtime admirer and collaborator of Emory’s, who is designing the Denim Tears flagship space in SoHo, which will feature a perusable collection of rare African-art books.
There were his No Vacancy Inn partners, Acyde and Korsan, who broke away from their hectic schedules to come to his bedside. There was the actor Jordan Masterson, who flew in amid the SAG-WGA strikes. There was Ocean. There was Arthur Jafa. There was the artist Chris Burrows, Emory’s former flatmate in London who had been there the night Ye appeared at one of Emory’s parties, unannounced, to preview Yeezus before an intimate crowd. There was Guillaume Berg, the French DJ who had been out listening to jazz with Emory and McConnell that night before his medical nightmare began.
There was Nigel Smart, who bonded with Emory over a love of Ghostface Killah at a mutual friend’s basement recording studio in Queens, back when everyone called Emory “Tre Deuce.” Smart has always admired his younger friend’s ability to navigate new spaces—like the exclusive Manhattan nightclubs that Emory was somehow able to get Smart and their friends inside, despite being barely of age. “We always trying to uplift each other,” Smart said.
At the center of Emory’s crisis, care, and recovery was McConnell, sleeping in a chair every night for the first weeks when his life hung in the balance, keeping everyone updated on a group-text thread, and finally revealing their office romance to colleagues at Supreme. “She held him down,” Smart said. And she held the tribe down, too, keeping an upbeat and
positive attitude despite her dread, relaying good news over the group thread. Like when his kidneys regained function after weeks of dialysis and Emory said to her: “Tell the guys I peed.”
“She didn’t owe me anything,” Emory said, his eyes going glassy. “And I still don’t know what I did to deserve that.”
While he was still intubated, Emory had a realization that caused him to ask for a pen and paper. He began scribbling notes, but neither McConnell nor any of the nurses could make them out. A friend who was able to decipher Emory’s handwriting came to the rescue. Usually composed, the friend was suddenly hyperventilating. “Oh, my God, oh, my God,” he gasped, pacing with his hands over his head. “I know what he’s trying to say. I know what he’s trying to say!” McConnell stared at the slip of paper again. Soon the scribbles took shape. Four words formed into a question: Will you marry me?
In the months that Emory spent recovering, three at the hospital, three back at home in Tribeca, he says his relationship with Supreme was already beginning to unravel. When other artist collaborators were being proposed at one of his first meetings back at the office, Emory wanted to know what was going on with the Jafa collaboration. “James okayed it, and the shit got made,” Emory said of Jebbia’s initial approval of the collection and samples. The collection, however, has so far not been released. “They don’t have intentions of communicating A.J.’s art to a greater audience that can learn from that. They told me they did, but they don’t.”
Though much has been made about the Jafa collaboration, by Emory as much as anyone, there were other frustrations waiting for Emory upon his return. He thought he’d been empowered to bring new talent to energize the design team. To that end, he had carved out a contract for Du of Bstroy. In Emory’s first week back, Du was already gone.
After Emory stepped down, he took to social media to publish a string of cordial text messages he says he’d exchanged with Jebbia after his exit interview. In those messages, Jebbia seemed to acknowledge that he had erred by not discussing the Jafa collaboration directly with Emory. But by then, Emory’s time at Supreme was over.
“They talked about it,” Emory said. “But they didn’t want to talk to their African American creative director about it. It was uncomfortable for them. And that’s not my problem. ’Cause I didn’t create America. So I can’t get caught up in the politics of white people being uncomfortable talking about something.”
In the end, Emory said that there wasn’t one reason that led to his resignation; the Jafa collaboration was, rather, the culmination of an overwhelming sense that he was being undermined and second-guessed at Supreme. “The shit ain’t ‘The Tremaine Show,’” Emory said. “It’s ‘The James Jebbia Show.’”
And of course, there was the fact of his near-death experience and life as a disabled person giving every frustration at work a new texture. Office stress was hitting completely different. “What it’s taken for me to get back to work—Pick up the phone, baby!” Emory said. “It might be a hard conversation. For you and maybe for me too. Enlighten me. And make me see my perspective differently. That’s what discourse does. Or we just might disagree, have respect for each other, and move on.”
“You look so good!” the doctors, occupational therapists, nurses, and therapists sang out when they first laid eyes on Emory. It was the first time they’d seen him since he was wheeled out of their care eight months ago.
“Yooooo,” Emory responded, spotting a familiar face.
The photoshoot at NYP/Weill Cornell had been Tremaine’s idea. In a short documentary with the artist Hank Willis Thomas filmed before he got sick, Emory can be heard joking about his propensity—as a friend observed—to “art direct [his] pain.” But the mood in the hospital corridors was thick, not with tragedy, but triumph. This was the place where, in Lindsay’s words, the fortunate ones begin to “return to their full personhood.”
“Wanna see a magic trick,” Emory asked no one in particular, lifting his cane off the ground to throw his feet forward, propelling himself down the hallway—for several steps—without a walking aid, a feat met with gasps and nervous cheers. According to most of the medical team I chat with, it’s rare for patients to return, voluntarily, to the rooms and corridors where they have been at their most vulnerable, dependent, and pain-stricken.
When I gathered a group of aides and doctors in a conference room to discuss their reactions to Emory’s return, a genuine gratification radiated through the room. They had never seen him wearing anything but a hospital gown. Seeing Emory in his own clothes, one aide summed it up: “It’s like he’s back.”
Another autumn in New York was beginning. Having officially resigned from Supreme, Emory was refocused on a new Denim Tears collaboration with Dr. Martens, drawing inspiration from the history of Caribbean immigrants to the United Kingdom after World War II, commonly known as the Windrush generation. McConnell had just resigned from Supreme after the company released a statement about Emory’s departure that she found dishonest.
When Emory walked into the restaurant for our last interview, I noticed he’d made even more progress with his mobility. The Lofstrand crutch had been replaced by a hiking stick. He also seemed to be moving faster and with more surety than only a couple months before, a testament to his ongoing PT sessions with Paler. He and McConnell were in the middle of planning their wedding, which was only a few days away. Emory’s new reality of life with a disability has even begun to find its way—subtly, of course—into Denim Tears’ storytelling, with Paralympic athlete Garrison Redd serving as the brand’s newest look book model. Although his kidneys still aren’t 100 percent, they have improved. Feeling in his right foot hasn’t returned, but he’s been starting to wiggle most of the toes on his left.
“I’m a lucky bum, nah mean,” said Emory. “Unfortunately, I can’t thank everyone all the time, every time, but there’s nothing I’ve done that I’ve done on my own. I’ve had so much support from luck and life—and support from people.” He got misty again thinking about all the friends who came from far and near to spend time by his side in the hospital and all the medical workers, from janitors to surgeons, who helped him win his life back. Despite the unfortunate outcome of his time at Supreme, Emory said, “I’d do it all over again if it meant that I’d meet Andee.”
Although Supreme hoodies and skateboards with his artwork have yet to see the light of day, Jafa has high expectations for Emory’s work ahead. “For me, Tremaine is still very much in the early stages of his journey,” he said. “I mean, even though he’s accomplished quite a bit. But he’s like—he’s at that opening. I think it’s impossible to predict where he’s gonna actually land for sure. I would say, you know, he’s anointed, man. That’s a church term, basically. Meaning, yeah, they are who they are, but they’re as much channeling things as they are producing or dictating things, you know?”
It was a miraculous convergence of luck and competence that kept Emory on this side of life. It was love—for McConnell, for his family, for the dream of a family of his own, for what he’s put into his work, for the work still left to do, for his creative tribe, for the struggle and spirit of the Black diaspora—that seems to fuel him.
“One of the aides said, ‘Always look back to remember how far you’ve come.’ That was a bar,” Emory said, recalling a rehabilitation session when he was starting to walk again. “Even now, it’s like I live in pain, bro. But I remember when I didn’t know if I could walk again. I didn’t know if I was gonna live, if I was gonna get off dialysis, if I was gonna be able to make it out the hospitals, see my little brother grow up, marry Andee, take a walk with Andee holding hands, go down to Georgia and see my grandma. So I gotta remember that, when I’m going through stuff in the present. I gotta remember what I’ve come through.”
Mik Awake is the coauthor of ‘Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem’ and author of the forthcoming ‘Playground Moves: The Story of Rucker Park & Basketball’s Reinvention.’
A version of this story originally appeared in the 2023 Men of the Year issue of GQ with the title “The Near Death and Rebirth of Fashion’s Radical Truth-Teller”
