Bizarre fashion show ends with mud wrestling

A New York fashion show ended with a bunch of women looking stupid and not wearing their clothes properly. However, this particular show was unusual in that it was intentional. Elena Velez’s spring/summer collection 2024 featured models (or ‘anti-heroines’ as she insisted on calling them in the program notes, or what the designer called a ‘manifesto’) trudging through mud, which was intended to turn the catwalk into some kind of swamp. The ‘anti-heroines,’ clad in a mixture of traditional fabrics and ‘debris,’ struggled to move in the mud before eventually giving up and having an all-out brawl and ripping each other’s clothes off.

Given that the average onlooker might have mistaken this fashion exhibition for a group of drunk women outside your local bar, Velez felt compelled to explain herself in a statement. ‘The universe I strive to create through this brand has always been one which reinforces a creative space to have complex, dualistic, and paradoxical conversations about womanhood.’ And if that weren’t clear enough for you, she added, ‘It feels to me like the sanitization and unilateralization of womanhood in popular culture today leaves no room for the nuance and multiplicity we deserve as architects of labyrinthine interior lives.’

Still confused? Well, the designer had more to say in her ‘manifesto.’ Her new collection is a ‘ritualistic catharsis to the coddling, histrionic, and moralistic ills of oversocialization,’ and a ‘creative interpretation of the reorganization of contemporary society around feminine expressions of control and behavioral modeling.’ She described this as necessary because of a ‘climate of post-progressivism where resistance to a monolithic cultural paradigm is intensifying.’

If that doesn’t clear it up, then clearly you’re just a neanderthal who thinks a coat is just something to keep you warm and dry.