Elena Velez has emerged as one of the few American designers genuinely rethinking what fashion can do. Her work, which fuses industrial rawness with conceptual elegance, draws not from the traditional centers of taste-making, but from the charged spaces of contradiction: the Rust Belt and the runway, the masculine and the feminine, the utilitarian and the sublime. Born in Milwaukee to a mother who captained ships on the Great Lakes, Elena is not merely a product of the Midwest, but one of its most eloquent interpreters. Her clothes feel like artifacts of a vanished America—worn, dented, and haunted—but reassembled through a visionary lens. “I had a very utilitarian and very industrial upbringing that shaped the brand in her image,” she says.
Elena’s work draws from the charged spaces of contradiction: the Rust Belt and the runway, the masculine and the feminine, the utilitarian and the sublime. “I create work for future retrospect,” she says, “for a time when someone will ask who dared to say something.”
In her deconstructed silhouettes and distressed finishes, Elena offers a counterproposal to the dominant narratives of American fashion. Her practice is, in many ways, a philosophical intervention, reminding us that fashion is not just luxury commerce or fantasy, but an archive of feeling. In a recent collection, Elena explored historical symbols of feminine power—icons that emerged during moments of political upheaval. “I was looking at Joan of Arc. I was looking at the Statue of Liberty, Marianne from the French Revolution,” she recalls. “All of those different historical symbols of female representation of a country in tumultuous transformation.” She mixed these references with hyper-contemporary archetypes: the beauty queen, the cheerleader, the cam girl. “All of these forceful references but then also a little bit of contemporary varsity kitsch,” for instance the shoulder of a dress inspired by the cinched shoulder on a football jersey.
This method—bridging eras and collapsing distinctions between high and low culture—is a hallmark of Elena’s approach. Her references are promiscuous but never random. A collaboration with OnlyFans may appear superficial at first glance, but for Elena it fit precisely into her broader interrogation of feminine labor and visibility. “It really rounded out the narrative for the season in a funny and irreverent way considering the cam girl and this sort of online muse within the context of all of these great examples of national identity through history and folklore.”
What distinguishes her work from the merely ironic is its emotional urgency. “There is an anger to my work that is very present. A frustration,” she says. “But I think it’s a productive kind of anger.” That anger is directed not only at the structural conservatism of the fashion industry but at a broader cultural condition.
What distinguishes her work from the merely ironic is its emotional urgency. “There is an anger to my work that is very present. A frustration,” she says. “But I think it’s a productive kind of anger.” That anger is directed not only at the structural conservatism of the fashion industry but at a broader cultural condition she sees as hostile to nuance and multiplicity. “New York is kind of a monoculture right now,” she says. “It’s a difficult place to be a dissident-minded individual.” Elena sees her work as pushing against a growing ideological rigidity that flattens complexity into digestible slogans. “People are constantly trying to map where your work falls and how it lays onto a social matrix,” she says. “If you want to be an intermediary between the spirit of the Midwest and the culture industry, you walk a very fine line.”
Fashion has always relied on a tension between transgression and acceptance, but Elena finds that balance has shifted. Elena’s garments—distressed denim coats, resurfaced Ugg boots, crackled mesh dresses—aren’t nostalgic recreations of workwear; they’re haunted versions of it.
That fine line has consequences. “I’ve gotten all sorts of different hit pieces written about me, all sorts of very undesirable, uncharitable press,” she says. “Sometimes we’ll have trouble sponsoring my events and my shows. Some people will not attend.” Her refusal to conform has made her a lightning rod, but it’s also made her work something increasingly rare in the fashion world—interesting.
Fashion has always relied on a tension between transgression and acceptance, but Elena finds that balance has shifted. “We shamed and we banished all of our eccentrics,” she says. “We’ve reduced the window of acceptable dialogue. It turned into such a commercial vehicle that we lost our soul.” Elena’s garments—distressed denim coats, resurfaced Ugg boots, crackled mesh dresses—aren’t nostalgic recreations of workwear; they’re haunted versions of it. “They feel like they’re delicate and falling apart but not because they’re fragile,” she explains, “but by virtue of the amount of use and wear they’ve undergone.”
Her aesthetic is intimately tied to process. “I always place myself into the mindset of somebody who was creating with urgency and with speed and efficiency in mind, versus perfection or beauty,” she says. “I create work for future retrospect. For a perfect time where there is perhaps unity and less cultural divisiveness, and people can point to a time where somebody stood up for this value or that value.” Her belief in the future, in the slow accrual of meaning over time, feels almost unfashionable in an industry increasingly dictated by seasonality and algorithms.
But perhaps that’s the point. Elena Velez is not designing for Instagram. She’s designing for the archive—for the moment when we’ll look back and ask, who dared to say something when fashion became afraid of meaning?
Model: Natalia Spanhel, The Rock Agency
Hair and makeup by Tanya Renelt, The Rock Agency
Styling by Camille Ries
A version of this article originally appeared in Sixtysix Issue 14.
