All aboard.
On Tuesday night at The Box, Elena Velez transported guests west with a gritty yet playful collection inspired by vaudevilles, vagabonds and crust punks while the sounds of an old train car rumbled on against a genre-mixing soundtrack.
“Looking very much into the 1930s to the 1970s of youth-led subcultures that are very anti-conformist but also have a sense of adventure, heroism and mysticism wrapped into their proposal of reality. I thought it was a bittersweet conversation around escapism,” Velez said during a preview, using historical references she finds as through lines to feelings of today.
Her overarching themes of prewar discourse and the Dust Bowl landscapes of the Great Depression; American literature like Kurt Vonnegut and John Steinbeck, and crust punks — “a hippie subculture who are more like vagabonds who ride freight trains,” she said, seen through the photographed works of Mike Broday that visualize “a sense of nihilism, but also nostalgia; a desire to reconcile with a place and tribe,” and her show-opening sooty train hopper clad in balloon pants and paneled utilitarian corset.
The clothes had a contemporary approach to historical methods of construction, as seen through deconstructed, “tedious, scrappy” corsetry, which Velez is passionate about and was a strong point of spring in dresses with drapey, bunched skirts that looked like they’d been dirtied up through time with new surface treatments.
“I love this idea of very heavy stitched wax canvases and denim, but also materials that feel fragile and delicate but not because they’re precious or flimsy, but because they’ve been lived — and worked in so hard. That’s how we think of our jerseys and undergarments,” Velez said, cutting denim closer to the body in bustier jackets worn open atop Zhilyova’s lingerie alongside unbuttoned jersey knits, puff-sleeved prairie dresses and a big-tent striped mini.
The characters spoke to Velez’s ongoing message of the female anti-hero, depicting portraits of womanhood that are so often today “sanitized, unilateral and dishonest,” she said rather than the full picture, the good and the bad, adding sexy cuts to workwear and darts to men’s tailoring to bring the full picture of rawer, roughed-up femininity to life.
