If you looked at fashion news this month, "The Show That Never Was” was in sole reference to Hedi Slimane’s rescheduled Celine Summer 2024 presentation celebrating Dime’s Square and Brooklyn aughts subculture via skinny black ties and leather. Most of Slimane’s shows are at least odes to the former - this iteration is particularly nostalgic for the Dior days in its uniform. While there were more feminine cape-like leathers, red rhinestone studded black suits, and giant pink prissy bows(?!), the affair was mostly a reinforcement of the fashion status quo - and Slimane’s commanding slice of that status quo. i-D recently reposted a 2018 article by Max Grobe wondering whether skinny jeans could ever be subversive (assuming they will return into fashion as the cycle of trendy pant sizes flows on), and this show seemed like Slimane’s perhaps overly eager rush to answer that question.
Slimane’s show was published as a video, meaning if you just want the looks, you’ll be presented with a loose handful of faraway leathers and closeups of pale skin and diamonds. Still, it is easily digestible and available.
Some shows go from being concealed to revealed for less logistical reasons. There are the constraints of time that bury runway images and alter color in print or were never deemed important enough to document. There was the era of runway designed more for television than the Vogue runway app, resplendent with pouty struts, pantomimes, and striptease. Finally, there is the concealing power of Art. One may detect that Art is afoot when a runway is riddled with shadows, neon, obtrusive ambiance, or these days, AI infusions that provide a fantastical, transportation, or rhetorical quality. Art, or rather, storytelling, rhetorical snarling, and creative dynamism was certainly present in deep in the New York scene of Slimane’s fantasies, at Elena Velez’s SS24 show at New York Fashion Week.
Elena Velez was a finalist for the 2022 CFDA fashion fund and winner of the 2022 CFDA Emerging Designer Award. Her education spans fashion schools from Parsons in Paris to London’s Central Saint Martins, and her brand straddles the Milwaukee of her birth with New York City’s busy fashion landscape. She has dressed the most niche and “feral” of celebrities, featured peak-of-2020s-fame Julia Fox in her shows, and served as a fresh voice for non-coastal Americana, alternative feminisms, and deconstruction by way of the post-industrial. Despite her position as an indie designer darling, Velez has spoken often about her potential cancellation, whether for sharing Jordan Peterson clips on Instagram, for her connection to the podcast Red Scare, or for the way she runs her business.
In the weeks leading up to Velez’s SS24 show, she released a casting call for nonmodels. There was no reimbursement, but there was the opportunity to be seen by millions in the fashion publications worldwide that would be covering the designer. A passionate section of the internet revolted, but Velez held her ground, bracing for the inevitable reaction to her far more intentionally prodding runway experiment. In this case, that experiment involved a Bushwick warehouse filled with mud, and later, wrestling. Almost methodically, debate quickly erupted about whether this decision was more artistic, or algorithmically minded.
At the time this show was released, I was still considering and writing my piece on Peter Do’s Helmut Lang debut and the double standards set for independent and rising designers versus major houses. My criticisms of the double standards heaped on Do trickled over. Was Balenciaga ever questioned in how much they paid nonmodels, or did people assume the “honor” or exposure justified it? Despite the purportedly gargantuan hit of their controversial child-bdsm-chic ad campaign, Balenciaga has remained a powerhouse churning out endless product. Celine can cancel its million-dollar presentations at a whim (even when that whim is politically minded, a privilege nonetheless). Meanwhile, A $40,000 show for Velez will come from her mother’s retirement fund, and even after the show sales may be slow and sporadic. A New York Times piece on Velez shortly after the show reveals a brand run more by passion and people who must constantly sacrifice to deliver craft.
People called Balenciaga’s SS23 mud show featuring Kanye West (very close before his antisemitic meltdown) an empty spectacle, and there was very little in interviews, garments, or press notes to bat away that claim. However, when one is given show notes as detailed and garments as storied as Velez’s, shouldn’t we look closer than seeing mud and calling “spectacle“? Velez gave no post-show interviews, simply posting her show notes on Instagram along with her title: “The Longhouse“. I’ve included the notes below.
It doesn’t take long for Cathy Horyn, in her review of “The Longhouses“, to mention the shock of Alexander Mcqueen’s depictions of battered, fierce, violent femininity (and remember dated claims that his now legendary shows were pure spectacle) and Margiela and Rei Kawakubo’s use of their clothing rather than post-show interviews to communicate rhetoric. She was dazzled by the show’s wit, its display of talent, and its apt diagnosis of what is missing in the fashion landscape.
And yet, critiques inevitably ensued. Vogue reviewer José Criales-Unzueta wonders if this anti-cancel culture treatise truly allows one a mode of self-awareness or criticism (a wonderful question one could have asked Demna after his last few shows). He also reports at least one male spectator responding to the showcase by claiming he was “turned on.” Some took issue with the idea altogether. Because so many other New York designers had shows involving so many empty, trendy bells and whistles - the designer who fell into hot water weeks before NYFW, who featured mud wrestling, and whose runway images became dark and shadowed became a poster child of the season’s opulence for many.
Interestingly, most reviews of the show completely undercut or did not even mention Velez’s clothing.
This was the context I had when last month, I saw Velez’s pieces from SS24 on view for pre-order at VFiles. The clothes sat on a rack by the door, neatly and well-lit, devoid of mud or shadow or screen. Some missing runway showstoppers were filled in with pieces from FW23, continuous in their experiment yet totally separate in purpose. The experience was incredibly special - a moment to sit with, recontextualize, and consider clothing that before had only been colored by mud, rhetoric, and controversy.
My discovery - the impetus of this piece - was that Velez’s pieces are pigeonholed. Elena Velez is creating a new versatility, a more ubiquitous strain of Americana recalling the distant conservatisms of flowing dresses and frills aged by industrial decay and ready for a future of muck. While created with femininity in mind, there is no sense of gendered constraint in her clothing (sizing aside). This feeling arises with a dress so conservative in length and number of beady black buttons it becomes a coat, yet only when tried on does it reveal its translucency and odd rolling collar. Sometimes Velez’s garments reveal themselves simply, like raw-looking linen trousers with exposed seams and bell bottoms - perhaps asymmetrical at the hem. Sometimes they are a mass of latex or straps or thin rolls of cotton. Horyn was right: “The published runway images don’t do justice to the clothes”.
As garments, comparison to the old design masters is equally warranted. Thin silk dresses binding limbs recall Issey Miyake SS98, the distressed creams and yellowing whites imply Comme Des Garcons’ FW05 Broken Brides and the general direction and styling suggest Mcqueen at his barest and bravest. There is a corset in a peeling white finish reminiscent of Margiela’s white paint but perhaps more post-industrial than artisanal. The results never feel derivative, they are inviting to the wearer and personal in their construction. Even without models or mud, these are evocative, affective clothes.
With this in mind, where to place Elena Velez’s SS24 The Longhouse? On one hand, it is the experience those lucky few had in a Bushwick warehouse watching mud and skin and tackling. It is those dark inaccessible runway images too, as well as the handful of beautiful garments that were made to buy and touch and feel far from the reaches of its original context. What emerges are disparate shows we are asked to combine, experiences that color the other.
What I find fascinating is not simply these distinctions, but how they become so fraught for a young designer. In Velez’s case, we are presented with a runway defined by cultural critique, gendered experience, and tone, all inscribed onto powerfully diverse garments.
Velez sits at such an interesting intersection as a creator, eager to offend and skilled enough for offense to dissipate. On the rhetorical level, I’m not sure I’m fully in agreement with Velez’s party line. I believe it is possible to criticize modes of popular discourse without the now tired anti-cancel culture tirade, and possible to define feminism for oneself without platforming bigots. And yet, I also wonder what the women who wore pieces from McQueen’s oft-critiqued Highland Rape collection felt? Did those who donned Westwood’s Anglomania gowns become royalists too? This isn’t to say the rhetoric of a garment’s maker doesn’t immediately affect it (wondering aloud about whether a piece on the connection between orientalism and the affective quality of wearing a Galliano kimono exists) - it is to question the longevity of a garment after the rhetoric it is charged with enters new spaces.
In Velez’s case, I believe these garments will always be greater than the sum of the rhetoric in which they are placed, greater than the momentary flurries of controversy, greater than an author or label. This is not true of every designer’s work.Velez is creating garments that are designed to start conversations, broaden worlds, and expand the opportunities for its wearers.
I look forward to growing closer to these garments soon, whether in muddy discourse or ecstatic harmony.