Rising through the echelons of the New York fashion scene, designer Elena Velez refuses to attenuate her roots on her journey to success. Her label recentres the forgotten industrial ingenuity of the American Midwest, whether that sinks her or takes her to glory. 

Elena Velez is from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a city clinging to the western rim of wide Lake Michigan. While it is common practice to regard a designer’s birthplace as a significant yet secondary influence on their work, Velez’s Midwest heritage wholly envelops, elucidates and propels her creative output. As a young designer who has been vocal about the difficulty of accessing adequate funding, she is a gloriously outspoken defender of blue-collar, working-class artistry and labour. For Velez, the Midwest no longer embodies the industrial heartland of America; its role as the driving force of industry has yielded to the sombre cliché of boom and bust. 

Velez’s successes in the industry have been hard-won and she wields this fighting spirit with pride. In her Fall 2023 collection, a model strode down the runway with a firm grip on her CFDA award, wielding it like a weapon. Velez candidly shared with Women’s Wear Daily that she instructed the model to carry it as if “she had bludgeoned her husband with it.” 

A designer who successfully manages to translate their magnetic creativity with such emotional intensity usually has one hell of a muse. For Velez, the palpable love and admiration she feels towards her mother, Holly Church, and her specific matriarchal strength and femininity, fortifies her morals and aesthetics. 

Church was and remains a ship captain on the Great Lakes. Velez spent large chunks of her childhood accompanying her on tugboats, construction ships and cruise liners. These experiences explain the aesthetic joy and inspiration she finds in shipyards, metal factories and engine rooms. They also explain the disused boat materials and repurposed fabrics that have consistently been incorporated into her collections. These materials can be found in the heated, welded and hammered nuts, bolts, chains and fixings that festoon her complicated garments. In the past, Velez has explained that the inspiration for these 

hauntingly beautiful garments has come not only from the shipyard environment, but also from experiences with her mother’s female peers. “A lot of my friends and their mothers worked in factories or were machinists, welders or fabricators. They did a lot of hands-on work. These are [women] who were assertive, who were misunderstood because they were so focused on the task at hand. They didn’t necessarily have time for superficiality or self-decoration. I think that’s actually really sexy”, she shared. 

A commanding presence, Velez exudes an assertive dominance when discussing the professional obstacles that have held her back: “I have struggled upwards for a place in this industry against the impediments of class finance, cultural homogeneity and the geographical condescension of coastal elitism.” She has chosen to match this fierce sensibility with even fiercer designs. The proportions of her garments are stately and voluptuous, suggesting the power associated with exposing the female form. This power was first highlighted in her debut collection, Year Zero — Rinascita. In the collection, Velez moulded sheer textiles, including ship sails and boat upholstery, to pinching metal structures that both constrained and framed the body. Just as the metal constraints nodded to the designer’s brutalist sensibility, they also asked the model to endure pain: a sensation strongly associated with Velez’s fiery aesthetic. 

Worn and heavy, her garments unflinchingly play with the contradictions and constraints of womanhood: “I feel very much at home in my identity as a woman but admire the more phallic representations of femininity throughout history and culture”, she revealed. “The pioneer wife with her husband’s gun, the Belle Époque harlot counting her cash, the virginal succubus sinking ships of wayward men—women who own their desires unapologetically and make no excuses in regard to their capacity for wickedness.” In Velez’s work, there is no space for meek humility or girly 

submissiveness. Her corseted eroticism is never shown without an overlay of prairie-girl corn-fed grit. She is always offering a nuanced perspective on femininity. 

Velez’s goals are fluid. She is set on “climbing the ranks or burning them down.” While the cutthroat and elitist nature of the industry have sharpened her senses, outside of her brand she exudes an all-round warmth. She has chosen to use her success to promote creative job opportunities in urban areas that aren’t conventionally associated with fashion production, while also providing support to artisans and labourers in “flyover country”—a region often overlooked by the fashion industry. “I feel strongly that it is my duty to use my passion and talent to empower and inspire others … Small city makers deserve a place at the table.” 

Velez’s passion to create space for working-class and under-funded artisans stems from her own fight for success and exposure. While constituting the overwhelming majority of students in fashion schools and the fashion industry’s workforce, women occupy fewer than 25% of leadership roles within major fashion corporations. Disappointingly, the expectations of motherhood and childcare still create barriers to achieve success for these women. Dismantling these expectations, Velez has been candid about working motherhood. Velez can be found at work—sketching, surveying mood boards and overseeing fittings—with a baby in tow. Together with her husband, Swedish artist Andreas Emenius, the pair have “somehow just leaned into throwing our son over our shoulders and hauling him along through our day.” Velez has also been outspoken about the precarious space she navigates and the challenges of “expecting other people in the industry who come from money to understand the urgency for working capital.” Putting monetary concerns in the open, addressing her lack of access and asserting her rightful claim to opportunity, she speaks in a language that women are seldom taught in competitive and creative fields. 

Above all else, Velez’s collections channel a wholly Midwestern resilience and the spirit of its indomitable female icons. They evoke a nostalgia for Linda Manz’s boyish toughness in Days of Heaven, and the single-mindedness of Georgia O’Keeffe—who, beyond her artwork, was renowned for her progressive wardrobe and mystique. Most notably, Velez’s unconventional, commanding and formidable characteristics trace their roots back to the blueprint figure of her industrious mother. Following in her footsteps Velez continues to reconstruct conventional notions of a woman under pressure, going hard at work.