In the sea of New York Fashion Week’s collections that deliver mediocrity mixed with business, Elena Velez is an outlier. She is here to disturb the peace. And the system. The spring-summer 2024 fashion show took place at a warehouse in Bushwick. After the finale walk, a handful of the models started a mud fight. Some guests got splattered. Velez enjoys creating such discomfort. The designer gave no interviews after the show. She wanted the spectacle to speak for itself. Instead she let her press notes do the talking. “Where are our antiheroines?” she asked, adding that the collection, titled The Longhouse, was a “ritualistic catharsis to the coddling, histrionic, and moralistic ills of oversocialization.” Maybe the mud fight was a visual representation of our online interactions, which often lack nuance and have little care for context. Velez went on to state that the show was a “creative interpretation of the reorganization of contemporary society around feminine expressions of control and behavioral modeling” and a reaction to a “climate of post-progressivism where resistance to a monolithic cultural paradigm is intensifying.” It’s hard to unpack these ideas. What was clear was Velez’s commentary on contemporary womanhood. “It feels to me like the sanitization and unilateralization of womanhood in popular culture today leaves no room for the nuance and multiplicity we deserve as architects of labyrinthine interior lives,” she wrote. In short, and in plain English, her point is that women can be good and evil, kind and angry, soft and rugged, and passive and aggressive. Velez offers them eveningwear that remains as compelling and striking as ever; a standout was an askew and elongated corset that melted onto the body with a draped skirt covered in silicone latex. But most fascinating were her commercial propositions: waffle-knit tights, zip-up bustiers, canvas jackets and shirting constructed with seams and darts inside out, layered T-shirts, and a terrific cropped bomber jacket with its bust cups slashed in half. You want to meet the woman who wears Velez’s clothes; you might fear her, but you also want to befriend her.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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