Elena Velez CLOTHING

Wisconsin-born artist and designer Elena Velez launched her eponymous line in 2021 to pay homage to the American Midwest through a reinvention of womenswear classics. Operating in collaboration with local artisans, the label gives pride of place to regional craftsmanship, paying respect to its locale—and to sustainability—by integrating found, salvaged, or site-specific elements into its collections. Each piece is a study in carefully balanced proportion and form, where gathers, asymmetrical lines, and integrated corsets are harmonized to yield silhouettes that are at once stately and voluptuous. Textural and tactile, the brand’s dresses, skirts, jackets, and trousers are cut from sheer or drapey natural fibers, and left conspicuously unfinished with raw edges. Elena Velez’s unlikely marriage of brazen femininity and coarse tailoring blazes new trails for womenswear.