![\"Elena](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2023\/05\/25\/multimedia\/25ELENA-VELEZ-lkfg\/25ELENA-VELEZ-lkfg-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Jessica](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2022\/01\/25\/fashion\/author-jessica-testa\/author-jessica-testa-thumbLarge-v3.png\" "\\"Jessica")
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Elena Velez held up her phone. A banking app showed the available funds in her business account.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was Feb. 17. Earlier that week, she had held a runway show that earned her raves as an original<\/a> voice in New York fashion; reviews from Vogue and others called her \u201curgent<\/a>,\u201d \u201cprovocative<\/a>,\u201d \u201cdelightfully deranged<\/a>,\u201d a \u201crare talent<\/a>.\u201d Three months before, she\u2019d been named emerging designer of the year at the CFDA awards, the industry\u2019s version of the Oscars<\/a>. Her deconstructed corsets and asymmetric dresses had made the rounds on celebrities known for their propulsive sense of style: Rosal\u00eda, Solange Knowles, Julia Fox. What more could a 28-year-old fashion designer want?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, money. There was $370 in her account. \u201cAnd I made a $400 sale two hours ago,\u201d she said, meaning she had been in the red that morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That triumphant runway show, held in a Brooklyn warehouse and opened by a model-musician who lurch-walked as if she\u2019d been summoned from hell, cost Ms. Velez\u2019s company almost $40,000, she said, most of which came from her mother\u2019s retirement fund.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her cash runway was \u201cdays,\u201d Ms. Velez said. \u201cBut it\u2019s always been that way. The ramp has been days for years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue reading the main story<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEven today, I was like, \u2018Well, this is it. We\u2019re pulling the plug,\u2019\u201d she said. Then her publicist told her someone claiming to represent Kanye West and his new wife were interested in buying some pieces. Ultimately they bought about $7,000 worth, Ms. Velez said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She started her company in 2018, and lately these scattered windfalls have helped keep the business afloat. Orders placed on behalf of high-profile clients \u2014 like the stylist for Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s world tour \u2014 mean that Ms. Velez\u2019s outlook can shift from grim to manageably grim in the span of a day. Agree to host a branded party: small paycheck. Organize a sample sale: bigger paycheck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Earlier this year, she was named a finalist for a prize worth up to $150,000 from Fashion Trust U.S.<\/a>, a new nonprofit. Ms. Velez was hopeful. Hours before the winner was announced, in March, she recited from a spreadsheet she\u2019d made outlining how she might use the money: settle debts, cover new production costs, fund the next runway show, begin work on opening a factory in Milwaukee, her hometown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looks from Ms. Velez’s breakout runway show in February.Credit…Photographs by Albert Urso\/Getty Images<\/p>\n\n\n\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue reading the main story<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n But she didn\u2019t win. Ms. Velez smiled gamely at the awards ceremony but clapped her hands a little too tightly together, looked down a little too long at her untouched plate of roast chicken. Later that night, she won a different award of $25,000. Even then, she felt as if she\u2019d lost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m in trouble,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To sustain her business, to stay living and producing her designs in New York City, to convince herself that it was possible to succeed in fashion without money or connections \u2014 to just \u201cbe OK,\u201d as Ms. Velez put it \u2014 she needed more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Fashion is not an especially easy industry to penetrate. And making a living from it is even harder for young designers of color who don\u2019t come from privilege. Ms. Velez, whose father is Puerto Rican and who was raised by a single working mother, is certainly not the first to struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But she is bringing new candor to the struggle. There is a game of humble gratitude and head-down perseverance that Ms. Velez declines to play, even as her star rises. After receiving her breakout award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America, she wrote on Instagram, \u201ccould y\u2019all just stock me tho?\u201d over a zoomed-in photo of her young son\u2019s face.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue reading the main story<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n For those potential retailers, Ms. Velez does not make easily marketable hoodies or leather bags; H. Lorenzo and Ssense \u2014 the highest profile places that stock her clothes \u2014 are known for selling more avant-garde designers. Her garments are unapologetically gnarly and technically chaotic: a skirt shaped like an \u201cobeliskoid pillow<\/a>\u201d ($735), a cutout dress with \u201ccollapsing styling possibilities<\/a>\u201d ($1,475).<\/p>\n\n\n\n They are also produced in the United States, which is costly but core to her values. She dreams of building infrastructure for fashion manufacturing in Wisconsin, providing an alternative to New York and Los Angeles for herself and her local collaborators<\/a>. The Midwest is her muse, but not for its farmland and lakes. She likes its sharper, rustier edges, the industrial yards and seedy truck stops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ms. Velez\u2019s mother, Holly Church, is a ship captain in Milwaukee, and Ms. Velez spent parts of her childhood accompanying her on construction tugboats and dinner cruises. That proximity to manual labor helped shaped the Elena Velez aesthetic, which she has described as \u201canti-beautiful\u201d and \u201cunrefined.\u201d A 2021 collection titled \u201cVessel<\/a>\u201d used repurposed materials like boat sails and rigging line in slinky silhouettes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI have never been the female form of beauty that she wanted when she was younger,\u201d Ms. Church, 59, said by phone in April. \u201cBut then she began to understand that strength and beauty come in different forms.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue reading the main story<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Ms. Velez first started filling up notebooks with fashion drawings around age 5, according to Ms. Church, and received her first sewing machine as a gift from a family friend at age 10. She took sewing classes at 12 (the instructor accepted only adults, initially, but Ms. Velez looked mature for her age, Ms. Church said). At 15 a local TV reporter described the teenager as having \u201cthe talent and drive to be a world-class designer someday.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But for as long as she has wanted a career in fashion, Ms. Velez and her mother have been reckoning with its costs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ms. Church sold their family home to pay for Ms. Velez\u2019s tuition and fees at Parsons School of Design. To start her business, Ms. Velez said she raised about $450,000 from a handful of investors, \u201cwhich came and went in two years,\u201d she said. (Those investors have not given any additional money since.) There was a $50,000 award for being a CFDA\/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist, a $25,000 grant for small brands at New York Fashion Week and a $20,000 donation from a family friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue reading the main story<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Lately, Ms. Velez has begun taking predatory loans she finds online. Ms. Church has opened multiple credit cards and waits tables in the winter to help with bills. She said she has given Ms. Velez about $25,000 from her savings and, more recently, another $25,000 from her I.R.A. account. That last sum went toward financing the February runway show, covering expenses like catering and fake nails and \u201call of these dumb things that you have to have to get written about on Vogue Runway,\u201d Ms. Velez said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMy mom doesn\u2019t have a retirement fund anymore, and that\u2019s an awareness I have to confront and suppress every time somebody doesn\u2019t want to come to the show because \u2018It\u2019s too late at night,\u2019 or \u2018It\u2019s in Brooklyn,\u2019\u201d Ms. Velez said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet there is no sense of regret from either woman. \u201cI know that if she can find the financial footing, the rest is history,\u201d Ms. Church said. \u201cShe\u2019s worth every single ounce of energy to push her where she needs to go, so that other people can recognize what she has to offer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The problem, Ms. Velez has learned, is that recognition \u2014 the buzz around awards, reviews and celebrity endorsements \u2014 doesn\u2019t always yield tangible returns. If anything, she said, it contributes to the idea that things are going well when they are not. And these metrics have not been easy for her to explain to venture capitalists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue reading the main story<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cHow many accomplishments do I have to collect, and how many co-signs and check marks does it take before people invest in helping me keep myself afloat?\u201d Ms. Velez said, with an expletive or two. \u201cNobody\u2019s malicious. Everyone is just busy doing their own thing and assuming that you can take care of your own business, which theoretically, you should be able to do. But we can\u2019t deny that there\u2019s a lot of money in this space, and a lot of people who are playing are playing with their own.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n While home in Wisconsin a few months ago, she said, she drove past an Arby\u2019s with a sign advertising a manager position for something like $20 an hour. It occurred to her that there was more stability in that job, even if her job\u2019s perks included an invitation to sit at the Balenciaga table at the Met Gala in May. Then she realized she was unqualified for anything but fashion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s a heavy, heavy, heavy burden for me, and a lot of the people that I love,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd I think that I could live a healthier, more sustainably paced life doing another thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s from this mentality that Ms. Velez sometimes jokes about going to work at Pumps, a strip club in Brooklyn. It\u2019s a raunchy flavor of humor from a woman who often makes references to her own inevitable cancellation \u2014 an edgy, uncompromising attitude that\u2019s either savvily authentic or a form of self-sabotage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue reading the main story<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n On Instagram, she has fought back against questions around size inclusivity, arguing it\u2019s not financially feasible for small brands, and posted about being \u201cremoved from the line\u201d of a Met Gala after-party for causing a scene when her guest wasn\u2019t allowed inside.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ms. Velez does not always engage in fashion\u2019s mutual back-scratching. Elle magazine recently named her one of its \u201cwomen of impact<\/a>,\u201d celebrating her at a Washington event with members of the Biden family. But when Elle asked to borrow an Elena Velez dress for a cover shoot with Karol G, the designer declined, in part because she didn\u2019t think the pop star aligned with the brand. (She prefers more \u201cferal\u201d girls, like Ethel Cain and Caroline Polachek.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n She has pointed views on \u201ctoxic femininity,\u201d a theme she plans to explore in her next collection, and was recently a guest on the \u201cRed Scare\u201d podcast, whose controversial<\/a>hosts she has dressed. On the episode she answered questions like: \u201cWho hates women more, women or gays?\u201d and \u201cWho\u2019s the bigger problem in fashion, women or gays?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n Continue reading the main story<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n She has been critical of certain aspects of modern feminism, like the de-emphasis on motherhood \u2014 \u201cit doesn\u2019t rub me the right way,\u201d she told Vogue<\/a> \u2014 and once shared a clip on her Instagram of Jordan Peterson on \u201cThe Joe Rogan Experience\u201d discussing women \u201cturning university students into the infants they never had.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n These views come in part from the clarity that being a mother has brought to her own life. She became pregnant with her son, Atlas, at 25. Her second child, Freja, is almost 1. She has their names tattooed in tiny print on her cheek and neck. Earlier this month, she married their father, Andreas Emenius, a 50-year-old Swedish painter with whom she shares studio space in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAll my friends back home have kids, they own real estate, and I come here and I\u2019m like a teen mom,\u201d Ms. Velez said. \u201c<\/strong>I feel very much like I have to keep the struggle of motherhood back-of-house. Nobody really wants to see it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, she\u2019s often seen with at least one of her children nearby: napping on a couch at an industry cocktail party, sitting on her lap at a friend\u2019s downtown fashion show, being rocked in a stroller by her side while she speaks on a Parsons alumni panel. She\u2019s been told, she said, that it\u2019s \u201csuch a cute P.R. stunt.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n ADVERTISEMENT<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2023\/05\/25\/multimedia\/25ELENA-VELEZ-02-vjcz\/25ELENA-VELEZ-02-vjcz-mobileMasterAt3x.jpg?auto=webp&quality=90\")
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\u2018A heavy, heavy, heavy burden.\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Ms.](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2023\/05\/25\/multimedia\/25ELENA-VELEZ-01-vjcz\/25ELENA-VELEZ-01-vjcz-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\u2018Crashing and burning\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Ms.](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2023\/05\/25\/multimedia\/25ELENA-VELEZ-06-vjcz\/25ELENA-VELEZ-06-vjcz-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale\")
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