MEMOIRS OF SILK AND STEEL: ELENA VELEZ ON POSTMODERN ANTIFRAGILITY
Elena Velez is building a new kind of dystopia—raw, unvarnished, and unapologetically personal. Her distinct creative theory—an unconventional symphony of metalwork and chaotic femininity—serves as a living memoir of her youth in the shipyards of industrial Milwaukee. Since launching her eponymous label in 2018, Elena has burgeoned into a rising force within New York City’s subculture circuit, challenging conformity and reshaping the fashion scene from within.
Elena’s work dances around the conceptual dissonance of delicate and destructive, ultimately fusing the two to demolish the polished monotony of the contemporary fashion landscape. Her latest collection, YR6: LEECH, stands as a sterling continuation of her evolving narrative of force and femininity: a maritime fever dream drifting between the soft seduction of the siren and the cataclysmic pull of the sea witch.
To uncover Elena’s unmatched philosophy toward anti-fragility, creative censorship, and the obsolescence of static stereotypes, GATA sat down with the designer shortly after her latest NYFW presentation.
GATA: Hello Elena, it is a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for taking the time to speak with GATA today. Could you tell me a bit about your eponymous label, Elena Velez?
ELENA: I think the brand is really a public process of personal introspection: autobiographical storytelling and reconciliation with real world phenomenons. To me the north star of fashion (and contemporary art in general), is to describe the sensation of now and offer a meaningful proposal for how we can engage with these times. I design for a future where the pressures of the present are less acute and hope my work holds up when revisited objectively.
GATA: You were a fresh Parsons graduate when you founded Elena Velez in 2018. What motivated you to start your own label rather than work for one that already existed?
ELENA: I've been blessed and cursed with a compulsion towards the craft of fashion since early childhood and have had lots of time to put myself on the right path. It was always my plan to have my own brand but to work under another until I had the skills I thought I would need. However, I took advantage of every opportunity offered to show my own work post-grad which led me down a fast track to launching my own label.
GATA: Congratulations on the debut of your latest collection, YR6 LEECH! Could you walk me through the highlights of its message, design process, and its performance at NYFW?
ELENA: Leech is a composite image of the brand muse through an accumulation of our core concepts and founding lore: my nautical upbringing as the daughter of a ship captain (mother) on the great lakes, my thematic fascination with women of capacity; both good and evil, and the call of the void that tempts towards the depths of the unknown. I always design with lawful/ chaotic x good/evil archetypes in mind. This season was a devolving spectrum of femininity: from the sailor, captain's daughter, siren and finally into the primordial sea witch Leech. It's a very anti-disney little mermaid tale.
GATA: Your work revolves around the themes of delicate aggressiveness, “force and femininity”, and anti-fragility. How is this reflective of your own life? In other words, what sort of personal narratives have influenced these prevailing themes?
ELENA: As the architect of a very labyrinthine interior world, I live for paradox and multiplicity of truth. To me "anti fragility" is really about the beauty and poetry of life's abrasion. The notion that something can retain its fragility not because it's delicate and unsullied, but because it's been lived in and worked on for so long, is beautiful to me and reminiscent of the type of women I encountered growing up in a frigid, working class America.
GATA: You grew up on the shipyards of Milwaukee, which served as inspiration in implementing metalwork into your designs. Could you tell me more about the things you saw in that environment during your childhood?
ELENA: While this is true, "Milwaukee" in a more universal sense is a creative abstraction built with editorialized childhood recollections and fragmented memories of a time and place that probably dont exist anymore: shipyards, abandoned warehouses, piloting tugboats to break ice on the rivers, the smell and sensation of frozen metal... What I'm left with is more of a metaphorical description. I want to attempt to codify the spirit of an overlooked cultural sensibility into high fashion, and draw parallels to its relevance in our collective identity today.
GATA: How do you think Elena Velez would have been different if you hadn’t grown up in the Midwest?
ELENA: I think my creative process would have been pretty similar regardless of the origin story- still primarily autobiographical, introspective, paradoxical, contrarian, reactionary...
GATA: From your unique and definite brand identity arises another dimension of Elena Velez: an active advocate of sociopolitical themes, a new voice in the fashion narrative that has sparked quite a bit of controversy through the explorative nature of your creative visions. Even when intended, controversy can feel like a risk for a brand. What inspired you to adopt the character of your label despite this?
ELENA: To create work worth revisiting meaningfully in the future, and to be the artist I want to be (in these extremely tribal and censorious times), requires a violent ego death: a breaking with the desire to be liked or understood en masse. I think a lot of publicly enterprising young women like me have to reconcile with the inherent misogyny that even in 2025, a woman's moral purity is still reduced to her superficial likeability. I'm inspired to collaborate with other troublesome, eccentric, or mouthy broads who buck this notion. Well behaved (uncancelled) women rarely make history (good art). I have faith that in the future there will be an oeuvre of my work that paints a fuller picture of me, beyond the artistry of my collections, as someone who valued artistic integrity, spoke to the feelings of the times, and took meaningful stands against creative censorship even at great personal cost.
GATA: How do you expect audiences to respond to your work? How does this compare to the ways in which they actually react?
ELENA: I think about myself partially as a performance artist slash method actress and engage withmedia spin and our culture of media illiteracy as their own creative instruments to highlight other conceptual points I make in my collections. I think transgressive artistry can act as a defibrillator for the times. For better or worse, I don't really consider audience response. I think the calling to prescriptive creative industries requires an unwavering dedication to your perceived personal genius and an inability to resist inflicting that vision upon the culture at large.
GATA: Is there a specific collection or project that you were especially drawn to? What influenced your affection for it?
ELENA: I think my senior thesis was the truest culmination of all these disparate experiences and sensations. It centered on WWII and the controlled commodity industry. It was a portrait of the duality of man- capable simultaneously of great violence and great ingenuity. I got to activate my community of tradespeople back home to integrate welding into the collection as steel was an important regional contribution to the war front. It was a really holistic and thoughtful package about who I am as a designer. I haven't had the resources or time to recreate that process since but it's the dream that fuels me to continue.
GATA: If you had the chance to talk to your 2018 self, what is the biggest advice you would give her?
ELENA: I would have told her to pace herself and increase her dose of Zoloft. In all seriousness, I'm happy with where I am now and wouldnt want to alter the trajectory.
GATA: And to your future self?
ELENA: Have faith, protect your heart, and keep living a life true to yourself. I bleed for you.
