Who’s Afraid of Elena Velez?

Call-out Instagram accounts like Diet Prada flourished despite contributing nothing more than public complaints about designers’ failures to adhere to the Current Thing; fashion stopped being fun.

“I think any work that celebrates women indiscriminately, solely on the merit of their womanhood, is condescending and a cultural liability.”

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.”

“Ideological suffocation has been the background ambient noise of the last 10 years,” Velez tells me. “Unfortunately I don't think fashion will ever be the Caligulan bacchanalia that it was in the ’80s and ’90s.” Velez is bringing courage, both creatively and ideologically to the scene.

“I toggle between hopelessness and determination every 10 minutes,” she says. “I persevere because greatness and supremacy over this very tedious and silly enterprise is simply my destiny.”

“She and the women like her were ornery, assertive, relentlessly capable, weathered and threadbare. She was a monument of dedication to her family, her work, and her community.”