Elena Velez on Revisiting Her Heritage in Motherhood

Since Elena Velez launched her eponymous label in 2018, she’s been shaking up the fashion industry with her design juxtaposition of femininity and force; her nontraditional approach to fashion weeks, as seen through her viral spring 2024 mud pit fashion show, and her outspokenness about the harsh realities for young designers trying to succeed in today’s fashion industry.

The Puerto Rican designer from Wisconsin has garnered multiple accolades such as the CFDA’s emerging designer of the year award in 2022; a Vogue’s Fashion Fund win in 2022; Elle Magazine’s women of impact recognition in 2023, and is a recipient of the Fashion Trust US sustainability award.

But while these “bright and shiny front of house wins,” have been strong public achievements, Velez said they pale in comparison to the more “quiet and existential” moments she’s had as a creative setting goals and bringing to life the material vision of what was in her mind. 

She also feels accomplished in being able to “diversify the things that are important to me like having kids; learning how to take initiative but also how to release and let go of things that I can’t control or change — including public perception, and including letting my husband come in and help me manage the business,” she said.

In the current chapter of her life, after having children, Velez has newfound interest in her Hispanic heritage. The designer is of Puerto Rican descent on her father’s side, but was raised in Milwaukee by her single mother who worked as a ship captain in the Midwest’s Great Lakes. 

“I’m a child of diaspora in a lot of different ways. My father came from Puerto Rico when he was in college, and my parents separated when I was very young, which I also kind of consider to be a sort of diaspora. So my relationship with Puerto Rico and with my upbringing — or my relationship with my Hispanic identity, I should say — is kind of tenuous in that sense,” she said.

“I’m looking forward to revisiting and understanding that culture and that context from an adult perspective,” she added. “Because as a child, you’re told that things are important and that places are important, cultures are important, but you don’t feel them to be true in the same way that you do when you realize that your children also carry seeds of the Caribbean within them, and that’s something you want to foster and to cultivate in them as well.”

Her collections are inspired by the industrial nature of her childhood, pushing traditional Midwest craft, and breaking past the limitations that are sometimes set for Latina entrepreneurs, such as working in a certain narrative, tone or palette.

“It’s fun to play with my identity in different ways, and I don’t take myself so seriously — like my racial identity or my heritage is some sort of sacred thing that can’t be examined under a playful or creative context,” she said. “I really refuse to be quarantined into this compact political profile that would really limit my vision, or my experiences, into these stereotypes.”

She describes her customer as similarly nuanced and multidimensional women who “revel in their own autonomy at all costs, without excuse for their desires and vices…whose reluctance to conform to the sensitivities of polite society give them a singular punk perspective.”

A lot of Velez’s formative years revolved around language, culture and travel. She learned Spanish at a young age, and attended immersive programs from elementary through middle and high school where she also learned Mandarin and French.

Although she always dreamed of being a fashion designer, she thought it would be an impossibility and pursued becoming a government translator instead. This led her to appeal to the local Rotary Club, which sponsored her to study abroad her senior year of high school in Brazil. Her love of language, instilled by her father, led her to apply to colleges that would have facilitated a government communications career, as well as, “one Hail Mary to Parsons’ Paris,” she said.

“It’s funny how it’s only when the coin is tossed that you know how you hope it will land,” she recalled of her sole acceptance to the fashion school, which began her trajectory of becoming a fashion designer.

Velez said her Hispanic heritage isn’t a mindset she adopts consciously, but rather it is “baked into a much larger portrait of my own personal complexity.” But she does attribute her outspoken nature, industriousness, fixation on the idea of what is just and fair, and ability to “struggle for something and make something with very little,” combined with her responsibility to her ancestors as being “quintessentially Hispanic.”

“I think being Hispanic, it’s a very special coincidence at the end today that brings nuance and multiplicity to my perspective as a maker, but it is not the cornerstone of what makes my work interesting or meaningful,” Velez said.

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, WWD chose 10 Latino designers who are shaping the world of fashion today to photograph and profile. The images from this series will be featured in a national billboard campaign run by Outfront.