A lot of designers find inspiration in a coffee table book, a film, perhaps a recent tropical vacation. Not Elena Velez. She’s into headier topics concerning current events. Take her spring collection, titled SMITE, which her show notes said was “a creative inversion of the aggressor and a commentary on brutality under the pretense of heavenly mandate, examining righteous violence and asking who its victims and perpetrators are.” Additionally, it “challenges conventional notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ while exploring militant tribalism, secular holy warfare, and humanity’s enduring propensity for interpersonal violence.” Florals for spring, this is not.
“It’s really about distilling the sensation of the moment in time that we’re all collectively experiencing, and then trying to find visual and artistic references to communicate it through fashion,” the designer said backstage after the show. Velez is digesting the horrors of the world—war, political fragmentation—and turning them into confrontational and darkly glamorous clothes. “Our brand is entirely about binaries, dualities, and paradoxes,” she continued. “I think about my artistic language as very aggressively delicate. And so this season was really about the sensation of hyper-polarity and reflecting that through something that felt like … weaponized morality.”
Velez is labeled as something of a provocateur, but what she really does is add a layer of amorphous politics onto her runway. Last season it was Looksmaxxer Clavicular (a commentary on toxic masculinity?) and this season, she had the CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou stalk down the catwalk with a book about Watergate tucked under his arm, at a time when trust in government is at an all-time low and conspiracies ping around social media with lightning speed. (To balance that, she had Angela Nikolau and Ivan Kuznetsov, who scaled the Empire State Building for a daredevil proposal, close the show.)
While she said she loves to add “easter eggs” to her styling, she also slyly avoids any cut-and-dry explanations. Instead, she said what she really likes to do is focus on the idea of an antiheroine and the “gray scale” between two forces, to “blur the line.”
This collection, shown in the lobby of a former bank building in the Financial District amid roving spotlights, kept in line with many of her aesthetic signatures. Namely, the undone corsetry, the rust-belt workwear edged in hardscrabble stains, the vaguely historic draped skirts and jackets, the light whiff of steampunk. The softness of a long ruched skirt and a frilled blouse with a pink bow were a nice counterpoint to her usual tough pieces. This season, she moved away from her slick, wet look and favored dry, brittle textures: many featured crackling, arid surfaces, like caked-on plaster. This was her formal introduction of menswear, and it included everything from a hulking model with imposing quarterback shoulder pads on one end and an almost-angelic vision in flowy shades of cream on the other. “There’s a lot of combustible energy around masculinity,” she said. Add to all that the torn stockings, the knee pads, the vaguely Middle East-meets-medieval headpieces, and there was plenty of room for interpretation.
Press and consumers have long responded to Velez’s forceful, immediate design language. But what gives her her visceral power is her resistance to easy answers, and her darkly ambiguous starting place. To talk about heavenly mandates, militant warfare, and secular holy warfare at a time when wars are raging across the globe and religious extremism is reaching a fever pitch is to, yet again, invite controversy. But in an age where our phones bombard us with a stream of slick imagery (mostly ads), and we are asked to define ourselves in black-and-white terms, her fashion asks us to think about the uncomfortable in-between.