Hell Eisenhart creates sustainable, one of a kind pieces for their eponymous label Helena Eisenhart. Their intuitive and curious approach to design and collaboration has made them a name to watch among today’s rising stars of the fashion world. Their aesthtic’s strength comes from their singular vision that is the thread between ephemeral floor length dresses, experimental bondage corsets and baggy hot boy pants.

I met Eisenhart at their studio in Ridgewood to catch up, talk about their latest collection and look through their vast archive. Eisenhart’s studio is an extension of their apartment, which is fitting for a designer who makes clothing that is an extension of themself. Boxes of scraps of fabric are neatly stacked against walls and countless old journals of their childhood drawings are stored away.

Between Eisennhart’s studio space and their bedroom is a sparse room that they have converted into a fitting room. Whenever their friends come over, they tell me, they end up trying on their clothes. It only makes sense that their friends want to try everything on, Eisenhart designs clothes that inspire self expression. Clothes that you wear, not clothes that wear you.

As I inspect the lining of one of the asymmetrical blazer seen in their recent collection, I notice thoughtful patches of fabric, small details in the stitching, and secret pockets. For Eisenhart, the devil is in the details. They often compulsively rework and revisit pieces adding embellishments and fine tuning the design until they reach a point where it feels complete. It is an intuitive process, a labor of love.

Their palette is a mix of earth tones and deep reds and rusts, charcoal and beige, army green, burgundy, leather, and crisp whites. The restriction of color gives the collection a cohesive quality that allows Eisenhart to experiment with texture and form and incorporate mediums more commonly used in fine art from poetry to embroidery to painting to collage.

Their collection can be viewed like the ultimate cool kid wardrobe, or even a walking art piece, inviting the wearer to experiment with identity and layer pieces that would normally be at opposite ends of the spectrum. Eisnehart pictures their customers “layering corsets with oversized button up shirts or wearing a big cozy hoodie to feel safe and cute while stomping around in big boots.

Eisenhart’s understanding of the versatility of dressing comes from the fact that they make garments that they want to wear themself, inspired by the way their moods can change throughout the day. “Sometimes I wear five different looks in the day just because my mood changes and I want to change from my binder and tank top with baggy pants and briefs to a corset and mini skirt with a rhinestone thong. It's just very much asking myself ‘how am I feeling today or how am I feeling right now?’ And letting that be the guide.”

Eisenhart’s fluid approach to gender identity can be seen in the design of their strappy, patchwork pants. They designed the pants to be unisex, making sure that there was enough crotch room while still hugging the butt. “A friend of mine who modeled for me once said my clothes were gender affirming for them, and I honestly think it's all about the fit. I truly design for myself, and some days I feel more masc, some days I feel more femme,” they say.

Along with challenging the binaries of gender in fashion, think the imposing language of the labels “menswear” and womenswear,” Eisenhart’s aesthetic also challenges the misconception that the DIY aesthetic takes away from quality. There's this notion that high fashion and DIY are mutually exclusive. But in reality, doing it yourself doesn't necessarily mean that there is a lack of skill and technique. Eisnehart combines the worlds of DIY and couture through their background as a technical designer, seamstress and tailor.

They are constantly reworking old designs, repurposing old fabric, and referencing themself. As they have grown as a designer, they have transitioned from working with ready to wear to upcycling and committing to sustainability. All of the fabrics they work with are either deadstock or upcycled and often hand-dyed. They are currently working on sourcing upcycled buttons, rivets, and other hardware so that their designs will be made one hundred percent sustainably.

Everything Eisenheart creates is informed by their beliefs as well as their interests. They weave together a range of ideas and moods to create an inspired collection full of interesting stories at every turn. “The puff jacket from this collection for instance is inspired by waterproof parkas made of seal intestine that were used for hunting in kayaks in the 1820 in the Arctic. This type of garment was made purely for survival but also a really beautifully constructed garment,” they say. They were also inspired by Agnes Richters, a Victorian era seamstress who hand embroidered her life story onto her personal jacket while she was in a psychiatric hospital.

Their two most recent collections feature intricate embroidered poems sewn in a loopy, scrawled handwritten font that renders the words almost illegible. There's something powerful about having the words obscured. The fabric serves as a surface that slightly conceals the poetry the way a shiny object glistens at the bottom of a swimming pool. Eisenhart’s distortion of their writing mirrors how a lot of complicated emotions are experienced in a private and often indirect way.

While they were developing their own interpretation of self expression they were looking to books that documented subcultures of the past, including Fruits, a book about Harajuku street style their friend and assistant at the time brought over not knowing that Eisnehart used to obsess over these books as a teenager, and Dressing for Pleasure a mix kitschy and playful 90s and early 2000s fashion and 1970s fetishwear given to them by their partner at the time.

They also looked to films to further build their world. They cite Wong Kar Wai and Gregg Araki as two of their favorite directors. “Because my work is so intuitive and emotional for me, watching a dark comedy, or tragic love story to get myself in more of an emotional state and letting the characters inspire my work is also a form of inspiration,” they say.

Eisenhart’s interest in identity and performance has led them to create custom one-of-a-kind looks for performers including Dev Hynes, Carly Rae Jepsen, SOPHIE. Oneohtrix Point Never, the Frost Children and King Woman. “I'd really love to get into costume design, and have had glimpses of what that could look like for me from some of the performers I've worked with in the past,” they say. They are currently inspired by the performance artist Narcissister, who they first saw perform when they moved to New York in 2013. “I have been watching her videos again recently and I love her work so much. She really explores identity through her performances and with clothing too.”

Eisenhart keeps a list of people they want to work with and regularly collaborates with the same models, photographers, and stylists. From an outside perspective it seems like a loose sort of collective of kindred spirits. It also seems like a smart way to define a brand and keep their aesthetic consistent even as their designs evolve. Eisenhart’s collaborators clearly trust them and feel safe pushing the boundaries of their craft. I can’t help but think of my favorite director Jim Jarmusch whose singular point of view can be credited to the people he chooses to work with and the mutual respect that they hold for each other.

For instance Eisenhart’s frequent collaborator photographer Alec Venegas first took photos of them nine years ago before they were friends when Venegas took polaroids of them and their band. The photos of Eisenhart wearing a plastic dress they made striking an angsty pose in their bedroom are now the first in a long archive of collaboration between the two.

For their recent collection they worked closely with their friend and painter Tara Atefi. They made a trench coat with bat wings painted by Atefi and a dress made from combinations of work jackets and army sleeping bags with a painting of a nightmare Atefi had.

Displaying Atefi’s work on their garments creates a visual experience that lets Eisenhart connect viewers to the painting in a more dynamic and utilitarian way than a gallery setting. More people would see her oil painting dress in a day on the street in New York than if they were hanging on the white walls of a SoHo Gallery.

Collaboration happens at every level of Eisenhart’s process from the artists they work with during production to the photographers, models and stylists who use their pieces on shoots. One of their standout pieces from their 2021 collection, a reconstructed wedding dress inspired by the time they almost got married and the following urge to fuck up a wedding dress. They made the dress from a child's communion dress that they deconstructed. They sewed the top as draping onto the skirt and spent countless hours adding embroidery, draping and little details. The result is a one of a kind garment that inspires the same level of creativity that went into its construction in those who wear and style it.

“I've realized since that first construction of the wedding dress and having stylists style it in different ways and models kind of just throwing it on thinking they know how to wear it, there's actually like 100 ways to wear it and it kind of depends on who it's on and how they wear it,” says Eisenhart. “It's been really interesting to see all the different ways the piece has been styled because I don't want to tell people you have to wear it, I actually want to see how people wear it.”

They’ve seen a similar response to the strappy leather star tops that have been a best seller in this collection. “ I have one way that I like to tie it, but I'm seeing people wear it in all kinds of ways and I'm like, ‘That's actually really beautiful, I didn't think of that, that’s great.’”

Before Eisenhart was designing collections and dressing themself and their friends in head to toe Helena Eisenheart, they were a wide-eyed child with a love for dressing up and a meticulous attention to detail.

Growing up they would draw up designs, dress in eccentric outfits and hand sew clothing for their dolls. Design has always been a way for them to express themself and explore identity. As a young child they proudly declared to their dad that they would one day drive to New York. By the time they were a teenager they knew they were destined to be a fashion designer.

Before they developed their skill as an illustrator, they would annotate their drawings with details about each look. “‘Red and black white striped heels, black wool hat with pink and red paisley flowers, a little miniskirt,’ I would actually still wear a lot of this stuff now,” Eisenhart says as they look back through their childhood sketches. Their mom saved all of their early work and taught them the importance of saving and organizing.

For Eisenhart, the past is both a source of inspiration as well as a way to measure their growth. “I had a friend here today who's another designer going through my closet of old samples from ten years ago. They were like, You made that?,” they say.

“I was exploring a different side of myself during that time and that's still part of me, but that was me ten years ago. I had very different influences then. Like all of my influences in 2015 when I did my thesis collection were Science Fiction movies and everything was vinyl and metallic and totally different from what I'm doing now,” they add.

It wasn’t until they were 18 years old that their mom allowed them to use a sewing machine at home. Before that they would hand sew kitchen towels together for practice as a preteen. Around the same time, they began looking up fashion schools. They discovered a Parsons pre-college program and babysat and taught tennis to afford to go for two weeks one summer. While they were there they befriended another Filipino girl in their class who made neck ties and created a dress out of newspaper that they proudly wore as they wandered around the city taking in the inspiring street style.

The pre-college program further fueled Eisenhart’s drive to make designing their life. They were eager to learn more about the craft of design and took matters into their own hands. “I learned how to construct things from vintage to taking things apart and then reconstructing them,” they say. “I first started sewing because I wanted to learn how to make a corset or a dress or whatever. So I would take things from thrift stores and turn them inside out or take them apart just to figure out how is that pocket put on there? Like, how do you do a lining? Let me just look at things that I really like and figure that out.”

They took a photography class their junior year while they were still exploring different avenues such as photography. They chose to photograph their classmates and interview them about why they dress themselves. “I asked them about their favorite outfits because it interested me. And I realized “why am I doing photography when I’m really interested in the clothes?” says Eisenhart.

After they graduated high school they went to a technical design school in New York City before transferring to Pratt. While they were at Pratt, they entered a contest where they created a dress inspired by Noguchi's sculptures and it was featured in the Noguchi museum for a month. When they graduated they were selected to their first collection as part of the college’s thesis show. Having their work selected to be shown in establishments was affirming and gave Eisenhart a sense of confidence that eased their imposter syndrome.

They worked as a seamstress for corporate brands for two years after graduating college and interned for leather designer Zana Bayne for almost a year in 2014. After holding various technical jobs and working under other designers, Eisenhart began dedicating more time to their label. After they left a job designing for Hood By Air, the latest designer they have worked for, they began dedicating themself full time to the Helena Eisenhart brand while still working different side hustles along the way. They currently work repairing vintage designer for Amarcord Vintage and as an in-house designer for Glazed studio where they help customers breathe new life into old garments through tailoring and upcycling. “I am using all the energy I have now while I'm still young because I might not want to run around like this in ten years,” says Eisenhart.

Eisenhart recently launched their latest collection and was getting ready to debut a selection of their pieces at 8 Fields Market, a month-long pop up in Chinatown, before setting off to India on a much deserved vacation the next Monday with their close friends and frequent collaborators the models and twins Minnat and Sirat Kaur.

When asked what’s next, Eisenhart doesn’t hesitate before responding that their goal is to get their collection seen by more people in person. “I really want to bring my pieces off the internet and into real life as much as possible. I plan on having more events, whether that be a fashion presentation or a pop up or an art show with some of my more fine art pieces in a gallery setting,” they say. You can also expect plenty of future collaborations from them. “I have and will always work to create a collaborative community of creatives who want each other to thrive,” they say. “There are already so many barriers for entry in this industry and it takes a lot of support to get through. None of us are able to do this kind of intense creative work alone.”