Once upon a time Elena Velez was fashion’s darling. The daughter of a sea captain single mother from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Velez was interested in the collision of the industrial and the romantic, rejecting a Barbie-perfect beauty. On top of that, she made some compelling clothes. In Daft Punk’s world, things get “harder, better, faster, stronger,” but that’s not how things have developed for Velez for reasons that seem to reach beyond the runway and into politics, though as far as this editor knows, the designer has never declared hers. Yet it is clear that some have felt provoked, even rage-baited byVelez, who in turn seems to feel misunderstood.
The tipping point in Velez’s popularity was her fall 2024 show which was presented uptown at the same time as the Super Bowl and took an alt format. Presented as a salon, the central event wasn’t the collection reveal but a conversation (ostensibly) about Gone With the Wind between Dimes Square netizens Anna Khachiyan and Jack Mason, of The Red Scare and The Perfume Nationalist, respectively. Clotheswise, Velez proposed a kind of hyper-femme cosplay (corsets, heaving bosoms, crinolines, and swagged skirts) that isn’t so distant from the kind of historical romantic elements (inspired by the Marie Antoinette and Wuthering Heights) that we are seeing now. It was the context and innuendo around the event that resulted in most of the press corps falling away. If industry faces are few at Velez shows, there is an eager contingent of fans attending that seem not to be reached by other brands.
The designer soldiered on, presenting shows peopled mostly by characters like cowboys and beauty pageant queens, mermaids and pirates, “prairie princesses” and crust punks. At her spring 2026 show Velez said she was pursuing “the elusiveness of the American dream,” a theme that animates all of her work. In focusing on corsetry and distressed surfaces, the designer has made structure and decay a central binary in her work. It was at play in this season’s opening look, a corset with a metal frame paired with a smart looking pair of cropped pants. It popped up again in the deliberately frayed collar of a fine pointelle knit top shown with a tiered pleated skirt. Elsewhere, the pantless corset look was overdone, and while the dramatic Dune-ish get-ups, double waisted pants, silicon treated fabrics, and cobwebs do fit into Velez’s dark universe, they have been in the mix elsewhere for several seasons.
The designer decided on the online culture of looksmaxxing as her organizing principle for fall, saying she found “something really indicative of the times” in “these people’s almost suicidal desire or impulse to be beautiful and to self master themselves cosmetically.” Lookmaxxing seems to be a subject largely consumed by young men and is arguably connected to toxic masculinity.
Asked what her aim is, Velez responded that it’s to “make sense of the sensation of our time without any sort of lens of nostalgia or retrospect or prestige, and to just really focus on who are the most compelling and iconoclastic voices of this moment in time.” She added that this is something “that can get me into trouble because of the fact that I cast such a wide net and I try not to omit any of my findings.” When asked to articulate her point of view, the designer demurred, saying “it’s more interesting to ask thoughtful questions than to pose and force the viewer to accept my conclusion.” But surely there is a distinction between communicating one’s opinion through the work rather than being didactic.
Backstories aside, given that TikTok and other social platforms measure success for users based on engagement and influence, Velez’s assertion that she is “giving way to these singular iconoclastic voices who are commanding their own followers and who are really driven by a sense of self, independent of any sort of social or political or commercial context” rings false. Sadly, perception is often conflated with truth. From the barrage of information we are fed through screens we know that words, like images, can be deceiving—and will become even more so as AI develops. If we accept that actions speak louder than words, isn’t there an implied endorsement attached with platform sharing?
At issue here isn’t so much side taking, but that the clothes are so lost to the circus around them that they seem beside the point—from a fashion week context at least, and from a certain perspective it seems that Velez might be okay with that. Explaining that fashion has “just never been an accessible thing to me,” the designer says coming to terms with the commercial aspects of the business has been somewhat elusive. “I’m finding that as I mature in my creative practice, that becomes less and less a part of what I feel like my responsibility is in doing all of this. And perhaps it kind of relegates me to more of a performative art sort of fashion context.” Which begs the question: Why then do a runway show on the official calendar?
