Elena Velez’s F/W 2026-27 New York Fashion Week show resembled a live autopsy of online culture more than a runway presentation. The collection centered on “looksmaxxing”: the internet-inspired pursuit of physical perfection at any cost. NYFW is usually steered by heritage houses and polite trend forecasts. Velez offered something more volatile: a window into a generation raised under fluorescent ring lights and the judgment of social-media algorithms. And she sealed the deal with a feature from Clavicular, one of the X algorithm’s current favorite characters.
Velez, still in her early thirties, stands out as one of the few young designers fluent in the language of the internet. The cultural current is dominated by self-optimization taken to its logical extreme. Faces are flattened into grids, bodies are dissected by comment sections, desirability is quantified in followers, likes and engagement rate. Looks run the show, now more than ever. For the average person, physical appearance now carries the same weight as in the fashion world, shaping how we are judged and valued every day.
Velez has also never shied away from controversy; she’s known for putting right-wing personalities and liberal fashion journalists in the same room, such as in her 2023 Longhouse-themed show and her 2024 Gone with the Wind-themed salon (I modeled in both). This creates tension and gives her shows a transgressive charge. This year’s runway showcased of transformation so extreme it borders on violence. Models wore chin straps engineered to carve sharper jawlines, dental apparatuses that looked like torture devices, prosthetics that exaggerated cheekbones, brows and clavicles into hyper-idealized proportions. Corsets, Velez’s signature piece of clothing, cinched waists to near-impossible measurements. Bandages were wrapped around faces and torsos, hinting at fresh surgical interventions, as if the models had stepped onto the catwalk mid-recovery. The aesthetic blurred beauty and brutality, seduction and self-harm. The message was about ascension more than enhancement – and what it takes to “mog” in a world where mediocrity can feel like social death.
Velez went further than symbolism; she cast real figures who embodied that ethos. Take Liv Schmidt, the 23-year-old founder of the Skinni Société, a subscription-based community that coaches followers toward what she calls a “skinni mindset.” Schmidt’s brand looks to reframe thinness as a moral and social achievement more than an aesthetic preference. She presents thinness as a signal of discipline, desirability and control. Through daily step targets, meticulous food tracking and relentless messaging about restraint, she has cultivated an audience of young cosmopolitan women.
Schmidt’s rise has therefore been controversial. Critics slammed her for promoting disordered eating. After a Wall Street Journal exposé in 2024, her TikTok account was banned, intensifying debates about platform responsibility and digital harm. Yet Schmidt remained unapologetic and has recast her philosophy as empowerment – a “rebirth,” in her words – rather than restriction. In Velez’s show, her presence functioned as an artifact more than an endorsement, employing Schmidt as a living emblem of how aspiration can curdle into ideology.
But the undeniable star of the evening was the man who closed the show: Braden Peters, better known online as Clavicular. The 20-year-old has become a cult figure among zoomer audiences on streaming platforms, where he broadcasts his looksmaxxing exploits to a vast, impressionable audience. He walked in Velez’s collaboration with Remilia Corporation, wearing a unisex “Universal Work Suit” inspired by Yakuza tailoring. On his perfect body, the garment looked less like clothing and more like armor.
To understand the charge of Clavicular’s appearance, you have to understand looksmaxxing itself. The phenomenon originated in the recesses of incel forums around the mid-2010s, evolving into a broader online movement by the 2020s. At its core, looksmaxxing is the relentless quest to maximize one’s physical attractiveness – “ascending” from average to elite through a hierarchy of “mogging” (dominating others in looks). Entry-level practices, or “softmaxxing,” include skincare, gym routines and mewing (pressing the tongue against the roof of the mouth to supposedly reshape the jaw). But you can escalate to “hardmaxxing”: surgeries like bimaxillary osteotomies (double jaw surgery), fillers, steroids, even controversial tactics like “bone smashing” (hitting the face with hammers to fracture and redefine bones) or using methamphetamine to suppress appetite and stay lean. The community obsesses over metrics like clavicle width (hence Clavicular’s moniker), facial harmony and body fat percentages. The trend has exploded on TikTok, drawing in young men disillusioned by societal pressures and amplified by Clavicular himself, who’s been profiled in the New York Times as the face of this hypermasculine vanity.
Clavicular sits at the center of this ecosystem. He livestreams injections, documents recovery periods and narrates each incremental “ascension” in real time. There’s no glossy edit – and in an environment saturated with AI-generated faces and meticulously curated influencer feeds, his efforts come across as authentic (whatever that means anymore). His streams are pieces of performance art: Clavicular doesn’t perform beauty so much as the pursuit of it. The reckless and aspirational process becomes the spectacle.
And there’s an uncomfortable honesty to it all. Unlike the biohackers or longevity crowd, who cloak their pursuits in pseudoscience about health and extended lifespans (think Bryan Johnson’s blood transfusions or Dave Asprey’s bulletproof coffee), Clav is brutally honest. He does not pretending his endeavors are in service of wellness; he admits his focuses are dominance, status and raw appeal. Study after study has shown that attractiveness confers measurable advantages – higher earnings, lighter criminal sentences, greater social influence In that sense, looksmaxxing is the most literal expression of will to power available to young people who feel economically and politically sidelined. Can’t control the market or the system? At least you can control your appearance. Clavicular self-injects fillers, breaks facial bones and pushes boundaries that others sanitize. That’s what makes him so compelling to watch and root for.
Clavicular’s runway moment felt seismic. He did more than simply walk; he embodied the logic of the collection. He “mogged” the room – not in the ironic meme sense, but in the cultural one. That which began in anonymous forums has crossed into high fashion, into physical space, into institutional legitimacy. The algorithm has stepped onto the runway.
Yet there is a compelling counterpoint. If looksmaxxing is the obsessive ascent toward hyper-idealization, then anti-looksmaxxing might be found in figures of older generations such as Michel Houellebecq. Where Clavicular sculpts and refines, Houellebecq seems to deteriorate deliberately. Disheveled, indifferent to aesthetic polish, he inhabits a persona of decay. In his novels and public appearances, he resists optimization, leaning into the grotesque realities of aging, sex and entropy. If Clav weaponizes beauty as currency, Houellebecq weaponizes ugliness as indictment. One ascends; the other descends.
Both extremes reject the safe middle. Both force confrontation with the body – its malleability, its limits, its eventual ruin. In a culture that never stops looking, ranking and judging, that confrontation feels inevitable. Velez’s F/W 2026-27 show didn’t seek to offer answers or moral clarity. Instead, it staged a question in latex, steel boning and surgical gauze: what are we willing to become in order to be seen?