Last September, models wrestled in the mud at the close of Elena Velez’s show in East Williamsburg. Plus ça change; this season the pugnacious designer went head-to-head with the Super Bowl, foregoing the usual runway presentation in favor of hosting a salon and costumed ball on Fifth Avenue, just across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in what was formerly The American Irish Historical Society. And so instead of Allegiant Stadium there was the Upper East Side; and in place of hot wings and beer, elegant finger foods and cocktails. It was all-caps clear that culture (highbrow and “libtard”), rather than fashion, was the focus of this event, although Velez did create custom looks for attendees who mingled in the crowd. “This is not a commercial season for me, this is really more of a world building exercise,” she said, “more of an experience of what it means to affiliate with the brand and a very strong outlining of what our values are.”

A dedication to craftsmanship and craftspeople is at the core of the brand’s ethos. The Milwaukee-born Velez, who positions herself as an outsider and who is often characterized, to her displeasure, as a provocateur, is preoccupied with what she likes to call “geographical condescension,” which largely conflates with class, and which, it’s easy to conjecture, she’s experienced herself. “My purest objective as a brand,” she said, “is to really bring a lost Midwestern woman back to the American cultural narrative. More broadly the designer is “asking for a more multi-dimensional representation of womanhood, good and bad; one that accepts the difficult, complicated, ugly truth of being a woman as part of the beauty that makes us whole and complete and 360. It’s a character journey that sometimes goes through an antagonist journey, but ultimately resolves itself with meaning and goodwill.”

She’s correct in asking for more nuanced readings of femininity in fashion. It’s often the case that designers’ descriptions of “their woman” sound like Sex and the City character sketches—or this year, swans. The “desk to dinner” archetype is hackneyed, all the more so since Ozempic has made eating sadly démodé.

Velez hasn’t abandoned the runway altogether. “It’s fun and visceral, but I care equally for the story telling and research I put into the work and I think that deserves an equally celebratory experience,” she said. Still, she opted for an intimate salon this season as she searched, she said, for a way to “make something that feels relevant and like a concrete proposal for what I want to see in the world today and right now.” (Depending on how this idea develops, the salon might be a recurring part of the designer’s practice.)

She created an intimate evening. Instead of the “usual suspects” the designer included many of her “postmodernist… post-beauty, post-woke” friends who are “part of this avant garde movement in New York City”—namely Dimes Square. In making this move, Velez said, she wanted to “make sure the fashion industry still feels welcomed on that journey.” Indeed it was a picturesque affair, with men in frock coats resembling those in the portraits on the wall and women with their hair à la Fuseli. More transgressive than the many deep décolletages was the fact that people were smoking indoors, even as they gathered in a small room to hear a symposium on Gone With the Wind author Margaret Mitchell and her infamous character Scarlet O’Hara, hosted by podcasters Anna Khachiyan and Jack Mason, of The Red Scare and The Perfume Nationalist, respectively.

Both speakers believe this work of historical fiction, published in 1936, to be the US equivalent to War and Peace, and a highpoint of American literature. That, of course, is debatable, though the commercial success of the book is undeniable; more than 30,000,000 copies have been sold and the movie was a hit, as well. During the discussion O’Hara was placed within a lineage of “inconvenient” women (my term, not the speakers’) fictional and real, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’s Maggie, Madonna, and Kim Kardashian. “You could never say of Scarlett, she’s nice,” quipped Khachiyan who concluded that Gone With the Wind speaks less about nostalgia for a way of life that is better jettisoned (the topic of race was otherwise mostly set aside) than for a straightforward, and lusty, man/woman interaction. For his part, Mason suggested that the epic “is the first shopping and fucking novel,” the precursor to such tomes as Judith Krantz’s 1978 bestseller Scruples. Mason’s contribution to the evening added a much needed sense of levity generally missing from Velez’s endeavors.

However tenuous, this link between GWTW and the Greed Decade resonates with the mood on the runways, just as O’Hara’s coquettishness vibes with TikTok trends like bows, and with the antebellum aesthetic of corseted, crinolined, and tiered looks Velez created for the ball. There were more plain-spun looks as well that might have been pulled from a painting by Hogarth. In her opening remarks, the designer said the garments were “made of expensive silks and lowly acetate, cheap curtains, a couple of scraps… constructed in the same [kind of] tenuous and determined hands as the character they’re influenced by… Each look evokes an insistence on glamour in the face of apocalypse and a repossession of a time in women’s history when the sharpest weapon in her artillery was a red dress.”

Funnily enough, scarlet-colored dresses are trending at a time when fashion, and the world, are dancing on the lip of a volcano. Velez, who has been much heralded stateside, winning both the CFDA/Vogue Prize and the CFDA’s Emerging Design award in 2022, maintains a keen fashion radar. Just days ago Velez was named one of the 2024 LVMH Prize finalists, which will of course bring her further recognition on the global stage. Without the pressure of making a full runway collection, she abandoned the aggressiveness of the past two collections to flirt with a more conventional kind of prettiness. “I’m just letting myself be the bug and not trying to be the entomologist too much,” she noted.

The salon was a local affair, focused on an American author and story, and, as one attendee aptly observed, was a quintessentially New York City affair. A wide range of people were gathered together to engage in a multimedia experience that pushed against boundaries in the interest of building community and placing clothing in a broader cultural context. “Once I understood that part of my job as a fashion designer was to build spaces for engagement, I felt compelled to try something risky and new,” Velez said. Implied in O’Hara’s famous saying, “Tomorrow is another day,” is a belief in the future. New York remains a place where dreams can come true, and loyal as she is to her Midwestern roots, one suspects that the designer, as well as the salon’s attendees believe, as Sinatra sang, “...if I can make it there / I’ll make it anywhere.”