THE ART OF THE DRESS NO. I

Elena Velez

This interview was conducted by Veronica Gabrielle and has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Louis XIV once supposedly said that "fashion is the mirror of history.” The quote’s origin is obscure and likely impossible to find, but it possesses the ring of truth. In our Fukuyama-poisoned world: fashion, like the rest of history, feels over.

Pouring over runway images is a terrible task. It has been for years. I flip through runway photos every February and September, expecting trash, seeing trash, wishing for anything else. The consistency is reassuring: shit is easy to deal with: you throw it out. But something good, something brilliant? That’s a burden.

Art demands confrontation, acknowledgement. But who can tangle with art when the world of “fashion” and its criticism is desolate – lacking intelligence save for the few old guards left standing. The problem of Elena Velez is that of Walther von Stolzing, a song for a world that can’t hear music.

A student of Parsons, Parsons Paris, and Central Saint Martins, Velez is as classically trained a designer as they come. It was during my time as a fellow Parsons student that I first heard whispers of her name from the design faculty, which led me to her collection during a particularly bleak Fall / Winter 2022 fashion week. Brilliance is a wonderful terror to encounter when underwhelmed by mediocrity. It’s what I felt the second I clicked on the name “Elena Velez.”

Velez’ work possesses the freshly brutalized erotic alarm of Alexander McQueen, a John Galliano-style understanding of corsetry and anachronism. Much is made about her vision of “femininity,” and is described as “tough,” “gritty,” and “confrontational.” This focus on the “Elena Velez the woman” is easy and frequent, given how most fashion writers are women and women tend to make things about themselves – especially if they involve other women.

But Velez’ visions aren’t strictly of “women,” even if her visions are presented on their bodies. Fashion is a greater reflection; women are just the medium. Like Galliano and McQueen, Velez operates during the end of an era – the former two neared the Millenium, then, suddenly, Velez faces what feels like the end of civilization. Writing about 1990s fashion, the fashion theorist Caroline Evans explained that the true designers of an age “call up these ghosts of modernity and offer us a paradigm that is different from the historian’s paradigm, remixing fragments of the past into something new and contemporary.”

This remixing is exactly what we see in Velez’ work: Empire cut with motorcycle pants; obi belt with M83 jacket; slip dresses with ripcords, steel boned camisoles, all slashed and twisted as if by crime of passion and pasted together with mud like a golem. Velez’ designs transcend any premade archetype. Built from parts antithetical and discordant yet coalescing into a fully formed vision, the label ELENA VELEZ is the work of a genuine artistic instinct.

As I’ve come to know her, Velez is an intuitive worker, she possesses the blessing of gravitating towards things not from conscious knowledge but innate understanding. Velez’s recent Gone With the Wind themed fashion show/salon/ball catapulted her to enfant terrible and cultural provocateur, but it was her Spring / Summer 2024 show, “THE LONGHOUSE,” that initially brought Velez to the Right’s attention. The world of ragged, mud-covered longhouse-ees feels far from that of the Upper East Side Gone With the Wind (GWTW) bodice and crinoline belles, but they’re actually both variations on the same theme. The question of ELENA VELEZ isn’t what kind of woman she portrays, or the role of women, or even the role of the designer. It’s more general: what kind of world is this?

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What made you drop the traditional runway format for your latest show?


After The Longhouse show, which was a massive spiritual and financial undertaking, I was desperate for a hiatus of some sort. I wasn’t planning on partaking in fashion week formally but couldn't find sponsors who would bankroll an experimental event under any other pretense. Post 2020s, NYC has become an insanely polarized and censorial place where you can lose everything for having a wrong take so a lot of avant garde artists and politically homeless young people are forced to the fringes. There’s an atmosphere of covertness to the “dissident” culture scene in NYC that I knew would be fun to lean into. My vision was a sort of sexy and clandestine Parisian salon, dedicated to discussion, wit, and design. It feels like we’re living through an intellectual prohibition so rehabilitating the speakeasy felt like a good opportunity for contemplation. Whether the night lived up to that in practice is a different story.


What drew you to Gone with the Wind?


My recent interest in the novel came from the critiques of Camille Paglia, who shares my enthusiasm for dissecting female iconography in the Western canon. What initially captured my imagination was her character study of Scarlett O'Hara, a tangled and twisted, enterprising anti-heroine, who artfully employs her sexuality and cunning, first to meet the expectation of her day, and then to survive an apocalypse. To me, it's a brilliant American tragicomedy about a uniquely feminine brand of self preservation and intrepidness. It's the American Girlboss striver read for filth!  


What do you make of the critical reaction to GWTW? It was, after all, one of the most popular American novels for decades…


As a middle school honor student who was routinely waterboarded with a dense curriculum of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill A Mockingbird, and Grapes of Wrath, I have to say that the performative denunciation feels artificially manufactured. As a contrarian latinx woman, I can't stand the patronizing, infantilizing, and condescending discourse that insists on the necessity of arbitrarily appointed Sensitivity Coordinators™ to help us navigate complex subject matter.


Besides the reaction to GWTW, what’s your take on the critical reaction to the show itself?


Right after the show I steeled myself for the predictable deluge of slander but, anticlimactically, ended up sleeping through the entire media cycle. Once restored, I glossed through as much insufferable millennial snark as I could stomach in one sitting: “Faux Transgressive!” sure maybe… “Neo-con!” those guys think im a satanic whore… “Racist!”.. cliché…One blogger even “approximated that half the people in the room never received a covid vaccine,” equating the guests in attendance with entirely imagined differences to literal pestilence. The aggregate of show coverage ultimately revealed what I already predicted: that the Overton Window has shrunk significantly since 6th grade. This can only be good for culture right?


How do you brace yourself against an impending media onslaught without compromising your vision?


I think the way the press talks about me is a continuity of the things I critique in my art. How could I bring myself to hate or engage directly with the (predominantly female, occasionally spiritually female) writers who take cheap shots and hurl invectives at me and my collaborators? I regard them with the same morbid appreciation as the rest of my anti-heroine muses.   


Fashion media reaction is one thing, but what about audience reaction — what was the feedback from attendees?


By a majority of accounts, the evening was a smashing success. We smoked cigarettes indoors by candle light and drank red wine in crinoline skirts. For one night the downtown degenerates occupied real estate, rent free, in the uptown mind, holding midnight court in a lavish gilded age mansion across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.


You’ve said you don’t really intend to provoke, but I do think there is a deep value in provocation itself, especially within fashion. What do you think of this reaction to your work as “provocative?”


I feel like our culture's pathological altruism and toxic relationship with sEnSiTiVe SuBjEcT mAtTeR is really a testament to how far progress has yet to go. And what's with this insistence on making artists into moral arbiters? How can it be that some of the most popular contemporary artists of our times are celebrated for the same “faux transgression” that others are condemned for? I’m always struck by the tolerance for culturally sanctioned transgressions that just map onto a far left matrix. I think that pushing back against seemingly common trends in popular culture should be celebrated and protected regardless of what part of the sociopolitical spectrum it pokes at.

At the end of the day my politics are art and my ideological enemies are those who make bad art or, worse, curtail good art.  


What do you see as the designer’s role?


Taking the temperature of the times is what makes fashion great: the truest talent of a designer is an ability to translate this instinct and sensitivity into a creative proposal. The solemn duty of a maker who recognizes this gift in themselves, is to stand alone in the wind with their findings.


What other designers working today do you find compelling?


There are a lot of designers whose work inspires in me a soul crushing jealousy- like they took the words right out of my mouth: Charlotte Knowles, Dilara Findikoglu, Jacquemus, Margiela… But my truest appreciation is saved for eccentrics and outcasts. Vice signalling virtuosos- agents of chaos: Kanye, Galliano, Mowalola, I don’t trust artists who haven't earned a checkered past.


How do we make the men’s suit cool again?


We should probably start by making men cool again first.


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