SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW: How Clavicular’s ‘looksmaxxing’ took over New York Fashion Week.
Elena Velez’s F/W 2026-27 New York Fashion Week show centered on “looksmaxxing”: the internet-inspired pursuit of physical perfection at any cost. The runway presentation examined a generation raised under fluorescent ring lights and the judgment of the social-media algorithm. And she capped the night off 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 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 also courts controversy, by gathering 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.
Speaking of tension and transgressions:
Wild that he keeps getting these fawning profiles by "liberal" media outlets when he is outwardly racist, uses the n-word towards black people, hangs out with neo-Nazis, and has called black women ugly. https://t.co/Aj0AUMKR9T
— Corey Walker 🇺🇸 (@CoreyWriting) February 19, 2026
Earlier: Clavicular’s cult of ‘looksmaxxing’ speaks to the narcissism of our age.
So why then has this face launched a thousand thinkpieces? Largely because, Clavicular is seen as a player in the Very Online right. Indeed, an evening he spent at a Florida club with Groyper princeling Nick Fuentes and the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, where they bopped along to Ye’s ‘Heil Hitler’, became headline news. Clavicular also runs with an assortment of unsavory characters – anti-Semites, Christian nationalists, ‘redpilled’ acolytes of the manosphere.
But looksmaxxing itself is not an ideology. It is an absence of ideology, a vacuum filled by insecurity. Clavicular is best understood not as a right-wing thought leader, but as a kind of male-to-male transgender influencer. He, like Fuentes, the Tates and all the rest, are caricatures of masculinity.
The ghost of Hermann Goering smiles.
(Classical – and NSFW – reference in headline.)