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Draw a monster. What makes it a monster?
It’s a question I remember seeing splashed across the dash of my Tumblr circa 2012, though it’s a more relevant ask in 2026. What does evil look like? What is fear? Immorality? When I was younger, and still now, I was trouble-curious. I never wanted to get into it. I’d just skirt around its murky edges, participate in mischief of little to no consequence. I’d stick my finger between the slats of seats on planes, hovering my 2-year-old index finger just a whisper away from a stranger’s arm, the threat of a touch never fully actualized. I have no memory of this, but my mother does.
Attending the Elena Velez Fall/Winter 2026 runway show smelled like trouble to me. I tell my group chat I’m going. Everyone (except Byline’s managing editor Maya Kotomori, who is a fan of Velez’s work and assures that she’s “a sweetheart”) has almost the same response: Why would you go to that? Isn’t she cancelled? Isn’t she super right wing? Will Dasha be opening the show? As I recall she is quite problematic right? Their responses only made me more curious. I want no part of any of those things, nor did I want to morally support her perceived values, and I specially did not want to publicly align with them. But I wanted to know: was it really as bad as everyone purported? What actually goes on in the room where it happens? And if no one steps in to investigate, what kind of narrative rages on?
Draw Elena Velez. What makes her Elena Velez? It’s a rather right-wing portrait: close public friendships with the reprehensible Red Scare podcasters, flash photos at the MAGA-filled Young Republican Gala, a personal brand as a sort of purportedly punk post-woke ideologist with a grainy, moody Instagram feed filled with tattered tulle and Anna Delvey’s ankle monitor.
What do I assume from this outline? What do I actually know? A portrait of Elena is also a picture of a young designer with an unwobbling vision of provocation. But is provocation her statement of intent? Or is she simply holding her finger millimeters from our arm and claiming not to touch us? Or is she jabbing us full force with a sharpened metallic fingernail?
I come from polite company. Both in the way I was raised but also actively, right now, from the Susan Alexandra Valentine’s Day Store Opening Soiree, where girls clutch pink striped paper containers of french fries and sing along to Hilary Duff. I’m performing a fashion week outfit change—taking off my pants and unfurling my shirt into its final dress form in the back of my Susan-sponsored Lyft—when my phone starts blowing up: Clavicular is livestreaming backstage at the Elena show.
It makes perfect sense that right-wing-adjacent, looksmaxxing livestream paragon Clavicular would walk the show. Elena’s new collection is called ‘Manus Maxxima,’ a term that translates from Latin to literally mean greatest hands, as in size. It makes me think of looksmaxxing, the Manosphere’s beloved and occasionally violent practice of plastic surgery, peptides, extreme fitness and skincare routines. In Clavicular’s case: so much testosterone it’s rendered him infertile.
I’m in line with Maya, both of us clutching our orange cards inscribed with the S that relegates us to stand behind the more important seated guests, though we refuse to accept this. We stand stock-still like cattle waiting to be herded into a larger pen. A woman with microbangs brushes through the pulsing dark asking “Green cards? Green cards?” We laugh. “Girl, in this political climate?”
Despite having standing-room-only assignments, Maya and I slip into seats in the final serpentine row of chairs. I scan the room to see who walks among us. George Santos smirks in the center of the floor, laughing with Flo Mili. Matt Weinberger blinds unsuspecting viewers with his flash. The seats we’ve snagged are directly in front of where Crumpstack writer Crumps is standing. GQ’s Senior Social Director (and dear friend) Sasha Mutchnik trots up to us with a smile before the lights flicker once and the music rattles around harder in our ear drums.
It was the atmosphere that felt dark, controversial, cold—not the concept of the show or the clothes themselves. The room pounds, molecules of synth scrambling underneath the lights, like we’re locked in a basement under a nondescript Berlin club, not Berghain but somewhere seedier, more nondescript. If provocation is a design principle for Elena, I didn’t see it. The collection itself was fine—the garments were largely unmemorable. My friend in fashion finds it well constructed.
Models toil along in neutral shades of sheer tights and black thongs, wet-look button downs, wet-look latex. They wear rings outside of gloves, barbed wire retainers, dirty shoes. Some have facial modifications—garish chins and faces so dewy one was actually dripping with what appeared to be a viscous shimmering snot. Fashion should be thought provoking—but Elena’s just being provocative. What is she making us question besides Am I willing to accept this? Isn’t that a question we should be asking of the world?
After the show, I throw Clavicular’s latest stream up on my laptop while I jot down my lengthy litany thoughts. I’m eating pesto pasta on my couch while Clav, in his sprinter on the way to the afterparty, is asking if he can get botox injected directly into the shaft of his dick.
Am I bad for being here? is the question that plagued my conscious during the show. It was technically my first fashion show. In high school, my mom accompanied me to wait outside the Alexander Wang SS14 show, just to see what happened. I took a selfie with Terry Richardson, stared slack-jawed at the models streaming out of the Pier 94 warehouse. I would never go to an Alexander Wang show now. But here I am at Elena. Where does one draw that line?
Despite the amount of people who swiped up and responded GROSS to my George Santos story, I admittedly emitted a gasp of shocked excitement when I laid eyes upon his felonious filler-plump face. Despite Clavicular, Pied Piper of incels, closing the show, it was a little thrilling to talk to his undigitized face, to catch a glimpse of my profile in the back of his screen.
Elena Velez is a person who claims she doesn’t want her work to be viewed politically, then fills her work with intensely political references, packs her runways and its front rows with intensely politicized people. She's more well-suited for building a shocking world—even if it’s a mere reflection of the one we already live in—than letting her clothes speak for themselves. And maybe that’s all she's after.
