The Whore, the Girlboss, and Elena Velez’s America
The Whore, the Girlboss, and Elena Velez’s America
In a conversation on sex work, desire, and transgression, Camille gets the inside scoop on the designer's collaboration with OnlyFans—and attempts to get to the heart of her incendiary politics
Elena Velez has been described as “a rare talent,” “fashion’s problematic fave,” and the “Donald Trump of emerging designers.” She’s staged controversial Gone with the Wind-themed literary salons and held muddy wrestling matches in lieu of runway shows. And this season, she embarked on a collaboration with an equally controversial collaborator: the adult content behemoth OnlyFans, who made its first foray into the fashion industry as the sponsor of her Spring/Summer collection “La Pucelle.”
Drawing inspiration from the likes of Lady Columbia, the Statue of Liberty, and Joan of Arc, Velez aimed to build a “portrait of American aspiration” through the symbolic feminine figures that come to represent countries in times of revolution. She’s interested in exploring feminine archetypes, and sees the OnlyFans girl as a mirror to the American girlboss: an “intrepid, industrious women” who is “using all the tools of femininity, including sexuality, to improve her station.” Velez can relate: raised working-class in the Rust Belt, she’s worked hard to become an award-winning designer whose clothes have been seen on celebrities like Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek, and Rosalía. Though at this point, her provocative politics threaten to overshadow her designs.
Velez has positioned herself as the Red Scare of the fashion industry, claiming to be “apolitical” and “equally irreverent to the left and right,” even as her anti-woke posturing acts as a dog-whistle to conservatives. At the same time, she says she’s been misunderstood by the press—which would be easy to do, because while she’s a champion of free speech, she’s refused to define her personal views. This “radical centrism” has allowed her to have her cake and eat it too—attracting controversial collaborators like Anna Khachiyan, Dasha Nekrasova, and the alt-right comedian Sam Hyde, while also offering a thin veneer of plausible deniability everybody else.
I really want to love Velez. I think she’s a refreshing talent, and I agree that the fashion industry is due for a shakeup—or, as she puts it, “a cultural defibrillator” to jolt us out of our complacency and the creative malaise of overcommercialization. But while the risks she’s taken in the realm of couture have paid off, I’m skeptical of the reactionary, post-woke politics she’s come to symbolize. And I think the fact that she’s successfully framed herself as a rebel and political dissident—while simultaneously refusing to take a clear stand on anything, or engage too deeply with the ideologies her project attracts—speaks to the state of the culture right now. People are fed up, disenfranchised, and so hungry for transgression that the idea of someone speaking truth to power is compelling. And in giving voice to our collective dissatisfaction, Velez appeals to a wide range of people, from alt-right extremists to disillusioned liberals. This is what makes Velez, like Trump, a symbol of the times: a moment when everyone’s eager to overturn the status quo, but we can’t seem to agree on what it is.
After attending her runway show with OnlyFans, I wanted to understand how Velez—a 30-year-old mother of two, born to a Puerto Rican father and raised by a working-class female ship captain in the American Midwest—came to serve as an emblem for conservative politics, and what she really stands for when the chips are down. In the below interview, I attempted to elicit answers about what she believes, withholding my commentary and focusing on the lived experiences that underpin our differing world views. I encourage you to read through and form your own opinions.
Camille Sojit Pejcha: Tell me about the collaboration with OnlyFans and how it fits into the brand’s ethos.
Elena Velez: Most of my work is autobiographical. It has to do with my coming of age as a woman, and with my fluctuating relationship with feminism. And one of the central archetypes of the brand is the harlot, the whore, the pioneer wife—the woman who who is activating all of these parts of her personality, the good and bad, to survive and to thrive. I love this idea of the girl that is intrepid and industrious and is using all of the tools of her femininity, including her sexuality, to improve her station or transform her life. I relate to that a lot as somebody from the Midwest from a lower socioeconomic background who wanted to be a fashion design star in on the creative coasts. The idea of the whore is transcendental. It’s an experience that women and men alike can relate to. We’re all kind of baring ourselves—sexually, commercially, or professionally—for the sake of material improvement.
“The idea of the whore is transcendental. It’s an experience that women and men alike can relate to. We’re all kind of baring ourselves—sexually, commercially, or professionally—for the sake of material improvement.”
This collection was exploring all of these folkloric, historic, and contemporary representations of women who represents a people or a country. We were looking at Lady Liberty, we were looking at like Marianne from the French Revolution, Joan of Arc—all of these representations of women that embody the spirit of a place in turmoil or in revolution. And we juxtaposed that with a bunch of pop culture references, like the cheerleaders and pageant queens.
Camille: In the show notes, you said something about how OnlyFans is shaping the new face of feminine aspiration in America. Could you elaborate on that?
Elena: I have this fascination with the American girlboss because I think she’s such a sinister, intriguing figure. And I see a little bit of her archetype in the OnlyFans camgirl. It felt like a cheeky nod to the shadow side of the intrepid pioneering American woman today. A couple of seasons ago, we did a salon about Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind as another iconic American antiheroine who is like, the epitome of this sort of girlboss striver zeitgeist.
Camille: That was a controversial choice, and one you said was misrepresented by the media. To really distill it down, what was the message you wanted to get across with that salon?
Elena’s publicist says this is off limits to discuss.
Camille: Okay. What are the cultural shifts you’ve observed, and aim to address in your work?
Elena: I think a lot about this authoritarian culture that is dissuading meaningful discussion. And just a general feeling of creative malaise that comes with overcommercialization. People need to experience a sort of cultural defibrillator. People need to experience work that isn’t platitudinal, that isn’t politically affirmational, and that is really just telling the story of what it feels like to exist right now from an objective and independent perspective.
I could quantify the zeitgeist. But at the same time, I feel very strongly that I’m the bug and not the entomologist. And I want the work to speak in a more experiential psychological way, because I find that the more literally you address a problem, the more political or mundane or alienating it can become. It becomes a real thing versus a feeling. And for me, like, the most impactful art is always a feeling that can be abstractly, subjectively distilled based on your personal experience.
Camille: You’ve framed yourself as a punk and a dissident, and have accused other designers of making regime art. What do you think is subversive about what you’re doing?
Elena: There definitely is a very punk proclivity to the brand, and a lot of this comes from my education at Central Saint Martins, where they push you towards the creative extremes. The professors would say that the closer you get to something that is just awful and hideous and disgusting and that should not exist, that’s the precipice of innovation and creativity and genius, and to keep pushing that boundary of what’s palatable or beautiful or acceptable. Because that’s where ingenuity can live. That really resonated with me.
I think we live in a really divisive time. There are a lot of people who are kind of forced out of the mainstream because they don’t identify with the sociopolitical matrix that the culture industry is predominantly run on.
Camille: You’ve referenced dominant culture a few times. What do you see as the status quo that you are pushing back against?
Elena: Well, I don’t want to get too political. We’re a really apolitical brand. I poke at both sides of the political spectrum. But I do think that to be successful in the fashion industry, you have to adhere to a certain playbook of how to talk about current events and brand values, and I don’t identify with that. I’m very much an outsider in this space. I’m from the Midwest, and I come from a very blue collar background. I’m the daughter of an immigrant. I was raised in a very low income social bracket. Fashion was never something that was accessible to me. And so coming to New York and being airdropped into this very cosmopolitan, very academic, very polite society is something I reconcile with a lot. It’s a social tension that is about all of these different things that create that dynamic. It is politics. It is race. It is about gender. All of this informs the brand.
Being an outsider in New York makes the dominant culture very obvious to me. So I’m really enjoying pushing back on that, and situating the brand in a place of radical moderation and radical centrism that is equally as irreverent towards the left and the right, the rich and the poor. But with that ambiguity comes a lot of people who are pulling and pushing the brand to fit into different narratives that I don’t necessarily identify with.
“People need to experience a sort of cultural defibrillator. People need to experience work that isn’t platitudinal, that isn’t politically affirmational, and that is really just telling the story of what it feels like to exist right now.”
Camille: What are some misunderstandings of you and the brand that you’d like to push back on?
Elena: I hate being called a provocateur. It implies a sort of cynicism and irony that I don’t feel as a maker. I have a really authentic, sincere connection to every story that I tell. And so I just want people to know that it’s not a provocation. It is an honest interrogation of these different things that I see out in the world. Everything becomes condensed into a meme, but I think that one of the greatest challenges is of our times is to protect your sincerity and your authenticity and your honesty and not to become cynical, provocative, ironic, detached. That that’s something that I wish people understood.
Camille: How has that been challenging for you as you’ve kind of witnessed this media narrative take shape around your brand?
Elena: I think everyone wants to appropriate something complicated and amorphous into a bite-sized package with a through-line people will viscerally connect to. And I understand that. I make peace with the current malignment of the brand. But I’m also navigating, like, what is my response? Do I clap back or do I ignore and just make great art?
Camille: Earlier, you framed the brand as apolitical—but also, you’re very much commenting on political issues and our present cultural moment.
Elena: It’s inescapable, because it’s very clearly defining the context in which my work is made. The Gone with the Wind salon, I knew that was going to be poorly received, but it felt really important to me. It was the story of a feminine antihero that I wanted to talk about. And it was also high-altitude training for what I knew I would have to get used to as an artist who wanted to make work outside of the commercial palatable Overton window, if that makes sense. I can create a collection and a story, but how it lives in the world is totally out of my control. We live in a outrage economy where people thrive on hate and misunderstanding. And I feel like the brand is misunderstood for sport sometimes.
Camille: It seems like in the past, a lot of what was seen as radical was political stance-taking—and you’ve cited admiration for designers like Vivienne Westwood, who was clearly aligned with a subculture and a cause. And now what you are saying is that it’s radical to not take a really clear stance and to leave room for ambiguity.
Elena: Absolutely. If you are in some sort of professional role where your personal identity is tethered to your ability to curate, identify, and speak to cultural shifts, you should be apolitical. You are a custodian, you’re a quantifier, you’re an anthropological observer, you should not engage directly with anything too deeply. The politics and the context of the day impacts the way that I make the work and how it’s received by the public. But it is also true that it should not inform the way that I continue to tell stories.
Camille: I struggle with this idea of being an impartial custodian, because I don’t think any of us are impartial. I know I personally have my own subjective experiences that inform my opinions. And I’m curious, if you were to kind of excavate your own past and think about the subjective experiences you’ve had growing up and in the industry that have kind of formed your opinions, what are those things that have shaped the way that you look at the world?
Elena: Good question. I think my origin story has the most to do with what’s shaped my perspective. Always being kind of a fly on the wall, traveling constantly and living in different countries since I was young, has kind of given me this sort of detached perspective on the different places and things I’ve seen.
Camille: I also moved a lot growing up, and going in and out of different environments shaped the way I look at cultural norms—kind of realizing that nothing is inherent, it’s all highly localized and contextual. How has it been, now that you are not moving so much?
“We’re living through like an era of real decadence—like, true privilege and true hedonism. And I think it’s changing things that we implicitly took to be true, that previously helped anchor our understanding of society and of ourselves.”
Elena: It’s been a really strange time for me because now I’m forced to reckon with the gravitas of being stationary. I’m married, I just bought a house, I have two young children. I have a business. I’m tethered to my community and to space in a new way. It’s forcing me to interrogate a lot of relationships that I didn’t feel the need to investigate before.
I think a lot of people are feeling this way. We live in a time where nothing is real anymore. We’re tinkering with all sorts of different things that we as a society thought were true, like our relationship with spirituality. God isn’t real anymore. Gender isn’t real anymore. The stories that we are consuming from the media and from Hollywood aren’t real anymore. It’s all open for interpretation—what is up, what is down.
Camille: Do you think that this stuff actually was real before and is becoming in some ways less real, or that our sense of what is real in the culture is more open to debate—to being reified and changed? And what do you think are the factors behind that?
Elena: Well, I think we’re living through like an era of real decadence—like, true privilege and true hedonism. And I think it’s changing things that we implicitly took to be true, that previously helped anchor our understanding of society and of ourselves as individuals. In the past these were things that were you didn’t necessarily have to actively believe in or take a position on. You just had too many other physical responsibilities in your life to be able to pontificate or to philosophize. And I think we have too much time on our hands, we have too many resources, too many luxuries, too many conveniences, and this has taken us away from understanding of what is good and bad for us.
Camille: We have all of these frictionless technologies that are bringing us dopamine hits all the time, but also, many people seem to me to be very alienated from our deeper desires or more meaningful sources of pleasure.
Elena: Well, they have those, but they’re dishonest about them.
Camille: Say more on that.
Elena: There is so much dishonesty around our desires as women, our proclivity towards wickedness and vice. And I think that this is part of what makes my critique of contemporary feminism so visceral. Making stories about women’s experiences through fashion in the post-Me Too era is still very touchy. I think with time, once the intense feelings we have around this cool, we can look back at them objectively through art, through storytelling, through good journalism, and we’ll feel differently. I’m trying to make work for that audience. It might not exist today, and that’s okay. But I want the stories of the brand to be something that is worth revisiting in history as a mirror of the times.
Camille: When we talk about this proclivity toward vice, what’s an example of what you’re talking about? And do you think it’s something specific to women, or just an element of shared humanity that’s been written out of the narrative?
Elena: I think it’s specific to women. It’s a conflict between the ways that we commodify ourselves as women as we become irrelevant, as we age, as we have conflicting understandings of our own sexuality, and the way that that maps onto culture. I think Me Too was the most interesting scenario to explore all of those different conflicting feminine desires and the way that they’re expressed—to live through these times and see how people commercialize their story.
“There is so much dishonesty around our desires as women, our proclivity towards wickedness and vice. And I think that this is part of what makes my critique of contemporary feminism so visceral.”
I don’t know how much you know about the The Longhouse discourse—that was the mud show—but that collection is a critique of contemporary feminism and the way that society has reformulated itself around hyper-feminine methods of control and of ethics. And obviously there’s a positive side of matriarchy, but there’s also a really stifling and amniotic sort of matriarchal existence that is toxic and negative. And I think both of those conjoined create a really compelling picture of womanhood. That’s ultimately what my true ambition is, is to tell a meaningful story about women for women. And maybe they’re not the women of today. Maybe they’re the women of the future. But I think that it’s not worth revisiting in ten or twenty years if I’m just telling a lie.
Camille: Tell me more about The Longhouse.
Elena: So we had like a bunch of different characters that season who were archetypes: the Banshee—shrieking, histrionic—the Matriarch, the Lady Cop, the Den Mother, the Bimbo Theorist. All of these really funny characters that distill these disparate motifs of the way women commit feminine warfare on the culture today, but also the ways in which they’re truly brilliant and masterful artists.
Camille: We’re in a time of, like, mass archetypification of women. The “types of girl machine” is in overdrive because there’s so much incentive to coin new aesthetics or archetypes on the internet.
Elena: Absolutely. There’s an economy around it now.
Camille: Bringing it back to the collaboration with OnlyFans, I’m interested in how you see these kind of complex power dynamics working itself out in sex work.
Elena: My publicist is going to shoot me, so don’t quote me verbatim on this, but [REDACTED STATEMENT ABOUT SEX WORK.] You know, like, I love the woman who takes responsibility for her desires and for her vices and does the thing that needs to get done. She’s got her eyes on the prize. But I don’t like when people want to have their cake and eat it too—to totally sanitize it into something that is palatable as any sort of other industry that does not thrive on vice.
Camille: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like what you’re saying is that you don’t object to sex work, but you object to the way this work has been normalized and destigmatized, because you think it’s inherently different from, like, a 9-5.
Elena: It’s not even about prostitution. It’s about trying to access your vice and your shadow side, but sanitizing it, putting a veneer on it, so you also get to preserve your virtue and your goodness.
Camille: I have my critiques of sex positivity and the commercialization of sex. But I feel there are consequences to the way we talk about these professions that have implications specifically for sex workers and the safety of people in the industry.
Elena: I think for me, it’s all too specific already. I have no real opinions on sex work. For me, it’s more of a state of mind. And I feel an inherent problem of our current culture is that we’re trying to sanitize, sensitivity-read, intimacy-coordinate, all of these dark original human forces that we have no business labeling or trying to trying to turn into a bureaucratic Excel sheet.
“An inherent problem of our current culture is that we’re trying to sanitize, sensitivity-read, intimacy-coordinate, all of these dark original human forces that we have no business labeling or trying to trying to turn into a bureaucratic Excel sheet.”
Camille: You’ve talked about how some designers reference social justice movements in their collection, but they don’t really care about the movements, they’re doing it to sell clothes. How is what you’re doing different in terms of how you pursue collaborations or position the brand in relation to politics?
Elena: For me to succeed in doing collaborations or fundraising my shows, I have to build an entirely parallel economy of people that believe in the brand for totally different reasons than why people would traditionally support a fashion brand. I’m very proud of the fact that our sponsors are people who wouldn’t necessarily identify with fashion as it exists now, but are very passionate about storytelling and about aesthetics and culture at large.
In the past, free speech wasn’t something that I ever identified overtly with. I felt I had this implicit privilege as an artist to create work from my perspective that wouldn’t come under such cheap critique. But my mind’s changed around that. I’m building this constellation of players who are helping keep the brand alive. Our front row is full of podcasters and literary figures and bohemians and artists. It’s not like the traditional influencers and fashion buyers. We had a biker gang.
Camille: I remember that. Who are they?
Elena: Oh, I met their president at a metal bar in Brooklyn, it’s a total shithole. We were smoking outside and they rolled up. They had the jackets and the accoutrements and the patches, and they struck me as like, unconventional fashion lovers. I love a uniform, and I love to see men reveling in their masculinity regardless of like all of these different like political or social forces that are trying to take them down a peg.
Camille: It’s interesting that you frame expressions of masculinity as subversive or, like, rebellious, when it seems to me like an embrace of tradition and convention. I’m curious how you would respond to the idea that while some of your political views are seen as transgressive in this very specific segment of liberal New York culture, they may actually be representative of the dominant majority throughout history or in different areas of the country.
Elena: That’s a fair question. For me, all I can do is comment on the times and the context in which I live now. I realize that there are so many things that I critique that I wouldn’t have the luxury to comment on if it weren’t for other things throughout the course of history that have enabled me the privilege to be what I am today.
I think the stories we tell, and the way that we’re curating our understanding of ourselves right now, is going to be a cornerstone for the future. For me, it’s important to be able to to move with the times, but also be a reminder of other opportunities and other ways in which we might be getting it wrong. Whether I identify or agree with the winds of change in our culture, they feel palpable to me, and that’s something that I want to be on the frontier of discussing. I think we’ve been living through a lot of very one-sided cultural trends over the last five years. And I can sense and the irritation and the energy on the street sort of bubbling up.
Camille: On your recent Instagram AMA, you rated your last show, like, 5.75 out of 10 or something like that. Why is that?
Elena: There were a lot of really difficult setbacks this season that impacted the show tremendously. And obviously you can imagine that a lot of these have to do with the perceived political affiliations of the brand. We had to do a lot of last minute logistical restructuring that compromised the show, so it was maybe a third of the vision that I had for that season.
Camille: I have to be honest, I heard a rumor that the crew pulling out really close to the show date because of the politics of the people you attempted to cast as models.
Elena’s publicist says this is off limits to discuss.
Elena: It will be revealed in time.
Camille: On that note, how do you think the outrage economy has or has not benefited your career as a designer?
Elena: I don’t like the way it makes me feel misunderstood, because I have good intentions. I put a lot of thought and care into the way that I tell stories, and they feel important to me. So to be misunderstood for sport is frustrating and disappointing. But on the other hand, I acknowledge that as a reality of the economy that I’m participating in, especially in culture right now. I’m not in control of my public profile or the way that it’s received by other people. It’s this fine line of, do I make it part of the work, or do I transcend and ignore? The most cynical and sinister I allow myself to be is to think about what generates cash and engagement.
We’ve also destroyed all of the gatekeepers and we’ve democratized whose input is most important. Companies will shift their strategic plans if they get bad comments on their Instagram.
Camille: Are you saying that the democratization of opinion-sharing on the internet has lead to a breakdown of authority, and that you preferred it before?
Elena: There’s a broader conversation here around the inverted ideals of diversity and democracy. Now everyone has an equal say, regardless of expertise and experience—the sorts of things that used to uphold the standards of good conversation and journalism. It’s like, for better or for worse, every time we take two steps forward as a culture, we take one step back. And I kind of fill that space between the step forward and the step back.
This is the second installment of a two-part series on the fashion shows brought to you by porn platforms this season. You can read the first installment on Anna Delvey’s collaboration with Pornhub here.
asking da important questions, we love 2 see it <3
This designer is playing the word game just like most people in all forms of entruperial businesses. Her publicist plays information gatekeeper for all things negative and questionable, she's no better, no smarter or creative than the highschool home economics student who takes issues with the high school hierarchy. You ask relevant questions and return you received word salad and interference from her so called publicist. You deserve to interview a real talent who admits or denies their views