Elena Velez Is Bringing the Rust Belt to the Front Row
To hear fashion people talk about it, you’d think this country was bounded by red carpets to the west and runways to the east, the pejorative term “flyover land” used to refer to the vast expanse between. But there’s no shortage of creativity outside the fashion capitals—something Elena Velez knows well.
Growing up in Milwaukee, as the daughter of a single mom who was a ship’s captain on the Great Lakes, and surrounded by welders, machinists, and fabricators, “my childhood spaces were engine rooms and dock houses,” she says. Rosie the Riveter-style pragmatism is in her blood. Though Velez traded Lake Superior for the Seine, departing to study at Parsons Paris, she took her home with her. She retains a certain Midwestern plainspokenness and has channeled what she calls the “blue-collar, bygone Americana landscape” into her designs. Her pieces are at once delicate, seeming to melt onto the body like candle wax, and built Ford tough, incorporating metallic hardware; she wants them to look like they’ve “been worn in from heavy work.”
The decision to incorporate her Rust Belt background came from, she says, “not seeing my tribe anywhere” in fashion. “I think my success comes from the fact that I am intersecting with an interesting zeitgeist. There is a lot of meta-commentary right now about what the future of American manufacturing looks like,” she says. “Politically, socially, it’s a good time to consider life outside of the coasts. After the last election cycle, you’re seeing how little conversation is happening between New York and Wisconsin. How is that manifesting? How can we create a fashion brand that speaks to those universalities of the human experience without falling under the New York/L.A. umbrella?”
Elena Velez at the 2022 CFDA Awards.
Velez’s talents won her the CFDA American Emerging Designer of the Year Award in November, and her pieces have been worn by Rosalía, Kali Uchis, and Caroline Polachek. Plenty of designers would be content to coast on those high notes, but Velez is just beginning. She hopes to create a co-working space in her hometown to produce her collection and those of other small brands who find the New York and L.A. garment industries prohibitively expensive. The project would include a venture-capital accelerator program that aims to help grow these brands. “If COVID showed anything, it was that the necessity of being in one physical space doesn’t exist anymore,” she says. “I’m trying to be a pioneer of that future.”
On working with Midwestern artisans
“A lot of the people that I work with don’t even consider themselves creatives or artists. They don’t identify with that over-intellectualized terminology. I’ll come home to them with a prototype of this really amazing bag or shoe that’s made out of steel that I worked on with locals in New York, and they’ll be like, ‘Wow, that is a shitty weld. That looks terrible.’ Just getting roasted from such a technical perspective, which keeps the work really fun and high-quality.”
Her mother’s influence on her work
“She was part of a very male-dominated space, and she had to appropriate masculine traits to be successful. Growing up, she had to be the mother and the father sometimes. Aesthetics just weren’t a priority for her. But she became one of the most aesthetic people that I had ever met. A lot of the collections that I create today have to do with that frustration of wanting her to be lovely and pretty and delicate, kind of critiquing that childhood fantasy, but still honoring it because it’s a part of me. So the collections are aggressively delicate and heavy-handed, but also technical and constructivist. I think it makes me a more interesting person to be able to hold both of those truths at the same time. It appeals to my genre of femininity and feminism. As I start to have kids myself, it’s something that inspires me—this concept of matriarchy and paradox and multiple truth-holding about womanhood.”
Velez’s collections have spoken to themes of motherhood.
On her spring 2023 collection, which spoke to themes of motherhood and bodily autonomy
“I can only respond to my own temperature as a woman, and I do not make political statements through my work. I think it’s not interesting, it’s not helpful. There are other people who have things to say more explicitly about the topics at hand. I care only about expressing myself in a sentiment, in a mood. And so I leave politics to politicians. I’m just here to capture the temperature.
Of course, [the overturn of] Roe V. Wade contributes to the mood. I’m a mother, which also contributes to the mood. But I think my political views are too complicated to exist in a way that supports one narrative over another. A lot of this has to do with holding multiple truths and my frustrations with both sides of the conversation. And I think for me, that collection was really more about manifesting that irritation and inability to think about the complex experience of womanhood.
I don’t like to be talked about as a mother-artist or somebody who incorporates motherhood into their work because nobody would ever ask a male designer how their children affect their work. There are so many concepts that are important to me that I’m just going to show you my opinion by doing it versus talking about it, because the narrative around those things is just so boring and inauthentic.”
What she wishes she’d known before getting into fashion
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing, because this beginner’s luck, this not-knowing, has prevented me from overthinking too much. If I had known how impossible it is to get into this industry and stay in this industry, I never, ever would’ve done it. I think it’s important that people protect that naïveté and run with it for as long as possible.”
On her Latina identity
“As [with] most biracial children of diaspora, I struggle with my identity. You feel too much of this and not enough of that: What am I entitled to take offense to? What am I entitled to take pride in? And so wins are always hard, because you never know which team it’s for. So I don’t think about any of that stuff. I just live my life as authentically as I can and whoever resonates with my story and finds optimism in it, great.”
How her definition of ambition has changed
“I was a professional athlete when I was young, and I saw how singular focus on one thing can be really dissociating when you break out of that community. How it just left you with a lack of identity. And I saw myself starting to fall into this same mindset with fashion. I’m growing my own company and I realized that if fashion ever just doesn’t work out for me for one reason or another, I feel like I don’t have a lot of life experience. And obviously that’s not true. I’ve traveled and I’ve done all these amazing things, but I was looking for self-realization and fulfillment in a different way, and things just aligned. That’s when I had my first baby. And I realized it was pretty cool and that a lot of the things that I had been taught about motherhood, especially in liberal spaces like New York and L.A., were simply untrue. And it was awesome. So I had another one, and things are still going really well. A bad day in my life is really tough. But the trajectory is upwards.”
Rosalía performing at the Global Citizen Festival in one of Velez’s designs.
On dressing pop stars
“If I got too wrapped up in star power, I think it would affect the work in a negative way. I’m not really impressed by celebrity. I don’t create specifically to connect with musicians or artists or actors. But it’s cool to see how different people give the work different contexts and energy, and it does break the fourth wall and feel uncanny to get to engage with people whose work you’re consuming.”
On winning the CFDA Award
“Obviously it’s very exciting. It’s nice to be recognized. I’ve spent a lot of my life working very hard towards something that I had a lot of faith in, and to see it manifest and to see other people get to celebrate it with me is really affirming. In terms of the practicalities, I think it’s difficult, because things like this increase expectation tenfold, but don’t necessarily increase the budget to capitalize on that expectation. I’ve never been closer to success and failure at the same time, which is to say the least, the spice of life. I’ve won all of these amazing awards, but there’s still $100 in the business account. There’s a lot of front-of-house success, but the bones of my business right now are so precarious. But I’m fortunate to have a lot of resolve in what I’m doing, and a lot of faith.”
A version of this story appears in the April 2023 issue of ELLE.
ELLE Fashion Features Director
Véronique Hyland is ELLE’s Fashion Features Director and the author of the book Dress Code, which was selected as one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of the Year. Her writing has previously appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, W, New York magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, and Condé Nast Traveler.
