Should Making It in Fashion Be This Hard?

When every other designer is scrambling to keep up with the ever-shifting progressive liberal decency mandates, Velez’s refusal to shut her mouth is inspiring. Very few avant-garde American designers feel as authentically American as Velez.

Velez’s clothes are thrashed, harsh, and even imply some kind of violence. She isn’t interested in “beauty” in the old-fashioned sense of the fashion industry, but in the chaotic multiplicities contained within femininity, even as women are portrayed exclusively as victims in the media.

“Coming from the blue-collar Midwest, a majority of my friends specialized in the trades: welding, fabrication, assembling.” Velez now works with some of these friends in crafting her designs as part of an effort to show that fashion can be made “outside of the creative coasts.”