Numerous designers discover inspiration in a espresso desk ebook, a movie, maybe a current tropical trip. Not Elena Velez. She’s into headier matters regarding present occasions. Take her spring assortment, titled SMITE, which her present notes stated was “a artistic inversion of the aggressor and a commentary on brutality below the pretense of heavenly mandate, analyzing righteous violence and asking who its victims and perpetrators are.” Moreover, it “challenges standard notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ whereas exploring militant tribalism, secular holy warfare, and humanity’s enduring propensity for interpersonal violence.” Florals for spring, this isn’t.
“It’s actually about distilling the feeling of the second in time that we’re all collectively experiencing, after which looking for visible and inventive references to speak it by way of trend,” the designer stated backstage after the present. Velez is digesting the horrors of the world—warfare, political fragmentation—and turning them into confrontational and darkly glamorous garments. “Our model is solely about binaries, dualities, and paradoxes,” she continued. “I take into consideration my inventive language as very aggressively delicate. And so this season was actually concerning the sensation of hyper-polarity and reflecting that by way of one thing that felt like … weaponized morality.”
Velez is labeled as one thing of a provocateur, however what she actually does is add a layer of amorphous politics onto her runway. Final season it was Looksmaxxer Clavicular (a commentary on poisonous masculinity?) and this season, she had the CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou stalk down the catwalk with a ebook about Watergate tucked below his arm, at a time when belief in authorities is at an all-time low and conspiracies ping round social media with lightning velocity. (To stability that, she had Angela Nikolau and Ivan Kuznetsov, who scaled the Empire State Constructing for a daredevil proposal, shut the present.)
Whereas she stated she loves so as to add “easter eggs” to her styling, she additionally slyly avoids any cut-and-dry explanations. As an alternative, she stated what she actually likes to do is give attention to the concept of an antiheroine and the “grey scale” between two forces, to “blur the road.”
This assortment, proven within the foyer of a former financial institution constructing within the Monetary District amid roving spotlights, stored consistent with a lot of her aesthetic signatures. Particularly, the undone corsetry, the rust-belt workwear edged in hardscrabble stains, the vaguely historic draped skirts and jackets, the sunshine whiff of steampunk. The softness of an extended ruched skirt and a frilled shirt with a pink bow have been a pleasant counterpoint to her regular robust items. This season, she moved away from her slick, moist 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 the whole lot from a hulking mannequin with imposing quarterback shoulder pads on one finish and an almost-angelic imaginative and prescient in flowy shades of cream on the opposite. “There’s quite a lot of flamable vitality round masculinity,” she stated. Add to all that the torn stockings, the knee pads, the vaguely Center East-meets-medieval headpieces, and there was loads of room for interpretation.
Press and shoppers have lengthy responded to Velez’s forceful, fast design language. However what provides her her visceral energy is her resistance to simple solutions, and her darkly ambiguous beginning place. To speak about heavenly mandates, militant warfare, and secular holy warfare at a time when wars are raging throughout the globe and non secular extremism is reaching a fever pitch is to, but once more, invite controversy. However in an age the place our telephones bombard us with a stream of slick imagery (principally adverts), and we’re requested to outline ourselves in black-and-white phrases, her trend asks us to consider the uncomfortable in-between.