Most normal New Yorkers settled down with beer and wings to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday night. But the city’s “dissident right” scene converged on an Upper East Side mansion across from Central Park to celebrate Gone With the Wind: as a fashion inspiration, feminist bible, and repository of edgy racial vibes they wouldn’t or couldn’t quite put into words.
At “Salon 001: Tomorrow Is Another Day,” models and e-girls and downtown podcasters abounded (the event was pegged to New York Fashion Week), the dim lighting flattered nearly everyone, and the drinks and apps were downright opulent. Even so, you didn’t have to squint hard to see something not all that different from a fandom convention for people interested in IQ hereditarianism, rather than the Marvel Universe or the Fallout franchise.
The event was the brainchild of Elena Velez, the fashion designer and dress supplier to Beyoncé and Grimes, among other celebs, who keeps one foot at Condé Naste HQ and the other in the subterranean world of Bronze Age Pervert, L0m3z, ZeroHP Lovecraft, and the rest of the weird racial right. Among the latter crowd, she told me in an interview at her Greenpoint studio weeks earlier, Velez finds a rare freedom from the “rampant totalitarian cultural hegemony” that prevails in mainstream fashion. This, even as she frets about “ending up at a Klan meeting: ’Cause that feels like the inevitable conclusion of exploring this scene.”