Elena Velez (Q2995)
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Elena Velez is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Elena Velez |
Elena Velez is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Fashion’s current infatuation is with all things demure; not surprisingly, Elena Velez, a maker of “anti-fragile fashion,” isn’t having it—or at least not the way it’s served up on TikTok. It might be tempting to roll your eyes or raise an eyebrow when you hear that OnlyFans was one of the sponsors of the spring show and that the designer expanded her guest list, as is her prerogative, to include the Hallowed Sons Motorcycle Club, whom she met on a cigarette break outside of a bar in Brooklyn, as guests. Yet at a preview, the designer, who has burned many bridges, suggested she wanted to try to build them instead. I have “this longing and this desire to overcome this idea of being fashion’s problematic face or overcoming this feeling of being misunderstood and wanting to show the goodwill and the goodness that we’re trying to do with the brand.”Coming from a designer who has been labeled a provocateur, the idea of approaching things from a more positive place was more than welcome, especially as it has often felt that Velez conflated strength with aggression or started from a place of defensiveness, perhaps related to class consciousness.The personal and the political came together in a collection in which Velez grappled (sans mud) with the current political situation in the States. The idea, she explained, was “reimagining the negative stereotypes around patriotism or affiliation with, and passion and care for, a place that you call home. So we’re looking at all sorts of different allegorical female representations of national aspiration or an identity…such as Marianne from the French Revolution, or Lady Columbia, or the Statue of Liberty. But then also trying to find a way to integrate that with a more contemporary interpretation of what that girl could be—maybe she’s the cheerleader or the Miss America sort of pageant queen—and just trying to merge these two really interesting universes around womanhood and what she can symbolize to a people and to a place.”The collection takes its title, La Pucelle (The Maiden), from the pen name of Joan of Arc: Heroine, Catholic martyr, and proto-feminist, who became a symbol of France, and freedom, after the revolution. Joan might as well be a patron saint of fashion/pop culture as well; The Smiths sing about her, and she has recently returned to the catwalk care of Dilara Findikoglu and Balenciaga’s Demna. The armor is only part of her appeal; the idea of a strong, independent woman is, even in 2024, provocative.
(It’s ironic that the presidential debate took place hours after Velez’s show.)
11 September 2024
Last September, models wrestled in the mud at the close of Elena Velez’s show in East Williamsburg. Plus ça change; this season the pugnacious designer went head-to-head with the Super Bowl, foregoing the usual runway presentation in favor of hosting a salon and costumed ball on Fifth Avenue, just across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in what was formerly The American Irish Historical Society. And so instead of Allegiant Stadium there was the Upper East Side; and in place of hot wings and beer, elegant finger foods and cocktails. It was all-caps clear that culture (highbrow and “libtard”), rather than fashion, was the focus of this event, although Velez did create custom looks for attendees who mingled in the crowd. “This is not a commercial season for me, this is really more of a world building exercise,” she said, “more of an experience of what it means to affiliate with the brand and a very strong outlining of what our values are.”A dedication to craftsmanship and craftspeople is at the core of the brand’s ethos. The Milwaukee-born Velez, who positions herself as an outsider and who is often characterized, to her displeasure, as a provocateur, is preoccupied with what she likes to call “geographical condescension,” which largely conflates with class, and which, it’s easy to conjecture, she’s experienced herself. “My purest objective as a brand,” she said, “is to really bring a lost Midwestern woman back to the American cultural narrative. More broadly the designer is “asking for a more multi-dimensional representation of womanhood, good and bad; one that accepts the difficult, complicated, ugly truth of being a woman as part of the beauty that makes us whole and complete and 360. It’s a character journey that sometimes goes through an antagonist journey, but ultimately resolves itself with meaning and goodwill.”She’s correct in asking for more nuanced readings of femininity in fashion. It’s often the case that designers’ descriptions of “their woman” sound likeSex and the Citycharacter sketches—or this year, swans. The “desk to dinner” archetype is hackneyed, all the more so since Ozempic has made eating sadly démodé.Velez hasn’t abandoned the runway altogether. “It’s fun and visceral, but I care equally for the story telling and research I put into the work and I think that deserves an equally celebratory experience,” she said.
Still, she opted for an intimate salon this season as she searched, she said, for a way to “make something that feels relevant and like a concrete proposal for what I want to see in the world today and right now.” (Depending on how this idea develops, the salon might be a recurring part of the designer’s practice.)
12 February 2024
Elena Velez wants you to feel uncomfortable. Rumors swirled this week that Velez’s show was going to be a mud fight, that editors and buyers would turn up at a warehouse in Bushwick and ruin their expensive footwear by standing in the mud.As you can imagine, a few folks dropped out. (“I just don’t need to do all of that today,” said a colleague.) But most still attended. Turns out the rumor was another case of fashion dramatization. There was mud, but the only ones standing in it were the models, who struggled to walk in makeshift footwear, kitten-heel slingbacks, and Nike slides. (The sportswear giant’s logo on the invite suggested a partnership.) After the finale walk, a handful of the models started a mud fight. Some guests got splattered, though a colleague wearing an old Céline white shirtdress did not, and neither did Amy Fine Collins, her prim Thom Browne ensemble left as pristine as it walked in.Velez has of late made clear and conscious efforts—sometimes too clear and conscious—to adopt an antiheroine persona online. The presumption is that she enjoys creating such discomfort. The designer gave no interviews after the show. She wanted the spectacle to speak for itself. That’s fair, the work did speak, but one can’t help but think of the questions shedidn’twant to answer about her online misadventures.Just two weeks ago Velez found herself the main character in the fashion corner of X (formerly Twitter) after communicating that this season’s casting would not be paid but remunerated with trade and exposure on this very website. It caused an uproar, and Velez fought back. There were catty tweets and replies and comments on both sides, and then the storm cleared, as it usually does online. Again, Velez thrives on this tension, fashioning herself as the mirror through which the industry looks at itself and questions its practices. But who will hold the mirror to Velez? That was the question left unanswered after the designer declined to speak. She doesn’t owe anyone an explanation, but it would have been powerful for her to stand behind her words and reaffirm her intentions. Alas, there’s always next season.Instead she let her press notes do the talking. “Where are our antiheroines?” she asked, adding that the collection, titled The Longhouse, was a “ritualistic catharsis to the coddling, histrionic, and moralistic ills of oversocialization.
” Maybe the mud fight was a visual representation of our online interactions, which often lack nuance and have little care for context. Velez went on to state that the show was a “creative interpretation of the reorganization of contemporary society around feminine expressions of control and behavioral modeling” and a reaction to a “climate of post-progressivism where resistance to a monolithic cultural paradigm is intensifying.” It’s hard to unpack these ideas. Post-woke is what it was; that’s one of Velez’s signatures. Is having women fight it out in the mud as their clothes fall off truly an act of resistance? “It kinda turned me on,” said a male attendee as we walked out of the venue.
13 September 2023
Elena Velez is not particularly concerned with your discomfort, or so it seems. Her explosive and aggressive show was an urgent wake-up call, and a challenge to the industry to do and be better. Underlining that point, Velez sent a model down the runway carrying her CFDA Award like a bludgeon. Accolades are nice, but they don’t pay the bills.“Fashion can’t just be a pretty thing anymore; the process has to be as engaging and meaningful as the product,” she said on a pre-show call. Velez is putting in the work, collaborating with metalsmiths in her hometown of Milwalkee on her own collections as well as encouraging their artistic expressions through her collaborator studio program, while also caring for her own team and her young family. Velez was raised by her single mother, a ship captain, and says, “there’s a huge matriarchy component to the brand.” Listening to the designer speak, it’s easy to imagine her as a crusader battling for the greater good, and against what she sees as the “disdain and geographical condescension” for the Heartland.“Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour,” the first fashion exhibition to be held at Crystal Bridges museum in Arkansas, just closed, and there were plenty of both of those qualities in Velez’s collection. The designer said she had been looking at “prairie wives, and lot lizards, and trucker culture, and all of these things that are deemed unglamorous by cosmopolitan standards and then trying to refract them into a way that feels new and fresh; kind of like the new heroin chic from the Midwest.”That’s a sound bite for you; the second look delivered the visuals for it pretty well. But even though Velez dialed down the sweeping romanticism of seasons past (it was missed), there was still corsetry and panniers. Some of the models had long flowing locks reminiscent of those in depictions of the Norse goddess Frejya (also the name of the designer’s daughter). These are hardly come-as-you-are looks. Hester Prynne came to mind, and there were BDSM moments, a carryover of some of the themes of last season.Many of the materials Velez used, including canvas, looked homespun. “I like to lean into the radically plain. I feel like that’s the next zeitgeist that I want to capitalize on. I feel like everything right now is just so synthetic and acidic and frenetic,” she said. In actuality the designer explored both extremes.
This was a multisensory show; the live, loud industrial music established what might be described as an amphetamine-fueled pace. Models, who were coached to express “female rage,” sped down the runway, some even seemed zombified. Velez also played with wet and crackled finishes using latex and a paint that when dry looked like plaster, neither are Plain Jane affects.
14 February 2023
Elena Velez became a mother for the second time in June while working on this collection, so it was no surprise that her show today was baby-friendly (even if the clothes were not exactly childproof). Julia Fox was there with her child, wearing a custom look by Velez. As the lights dimmed and the fog machines filled the room, Fox fed her son a bottle. At that moment the actor and model became the perfect muse, making for an acute portrait of the Elena Velez woman.Velez is one of those rare designers who not only has a tall order in terms of what she’d like her clothes to say but manages to often deliver in both messaging and execution. She designs with urgency, and her hand often comes across as anxious; her pieces are intense, combative even. She has described her work as “aggressively delicate.”Last season saw Velez offer rigorous commentary on the obligations of womanhood and the tensions that arise when embodying all the roles women like her perform at once (partner, entrepreneur, mother, self). This time around, “the story was about my dissociation with my own body, having seeded it as a conduit for other bodies through motherhood, through all the political assails on female volition,” she said after the show. “So a lot of the references have to do with BDSM, bondage, and sexuality in more violent ways.” Indeed, there was almost a “barbaric physicality,” as Velez put it, to the strapping, harnessing, and corseting of the body that grounded this collection. “My woman is nuanced and highly aware; she takes responsibility for her own desires,” she declared.The collection was focused and restrained at 30 looks, and it featured a range of elements like latex, strapping, and Velez’s now signature metal and steel structures that supported her storytelling. She continued to employ repurposed fabric; worked with artisans from the Midwest; and showed her recurring cottons, linens, and gauzes in neutral colorways.Most novel was a series of latex-dripped pieces, like the closing look worn by Richie Shazam, developed in collaboration with artist Caroline Zimbalist. Velez described those garments as living in an “amniotic, placental state” that plays with “female wetness” in a new way. But as compelling and convincing as her narrative is—perhaps because it is so autobiographical—Velez was at her best this season when she flexed her eye for construction and technique.
There was a twisted romance to her draping in gauze, like the dress in look 11, and a severity to her exact and intentionally unfinished corsetry. Some of her less complicated pieces, such as the belted button-down shirt in the opening look (modeled by Karen Davidson of Harley-Davidson), often spoke of her vision the loudest, maybe because they were the easiest to imagine being worn by the women we come across every day.As Velez continues to grow as a designer and reach wider audiences, she will benefit from continuing to expand this more restrained side of her design lexicon. Making space for arresting show pieces like her closing dress and subtle detailing such as placketed white shirting corsets or meticulously misaligned tailoring is key, but as much attention as the former receives, it’s with the latter that she’ll likely find her most loyal customers.
11 September 2022
Elena Velez held her show at the Freehand Hotel, transforming its Georgia Room, typically a bar, into a bare-bones space, accompanied by a soundtrack that began with a woman repeating “She was a disgrace to all women.” It was a cheeky way to start off a presentation whose theme celebrated women and their different forms of femininity. As for Velez’s version of femininity, it’s tough and gritty. She’s from Milwaukee, the only child of a single mother who is a ship captain. Velez stresses that she has her own unorthodox perception of womanhood, which, through her creations, has turned out to be wildly confident, a bit aggressive, and very hot.Much of her success can be credited to her great handle on the “tough femininity” dichotomy in her designs. The Parsons graduate uses fabrics that are made to last and have a military-grade toughness. Some of these materials include army canvas, Lake Michigan ship sails (a nod to her mother), and parachutes. More often than not, Velez doesn’t cover the original serial numbers on the fabric but instead keeps them in the final design, another grit-factor addition. According to the designer, the use of these materials is to show tension within womanhood.While Velez stresses toughness in her design ethos, there is no clunk in the pieces. The silhouettes are sensual and curve skimming. Corsets were a theme in the collection, sometimes deconstructed with sliced-off sections. Peasant tops, once romantic and woo-woo, were incredibly alluring, cinched at the waist with a boning motif. Even the long and loose and flowy ivory dresses, which could have been the nightgown of every bedridden Victorian woman, had sex appeal thanks to the artful way a strap hung off the shoulder or how the boning traced the body.Perhaps the most refreshing thing about Velez is that her fabric sourcing isn’t just lip service (honestly, name-dropping far-flung fabrics can feel like a P.R. stunt). It’s obvious she feels a deep connection to her materials, as evidenced by how she can exquisitely render and envision them as something so romantic and beautiful. A buzzy move, though? A striking model closed the show while carrying a cherubic baby (who was chewing on their fingers!) and wearing a black dress with a sharp oval cutout stretching from the sternum to below the navel. Truly a stunning version of femininity.
12 February 2022