Artist Rachel Ellenbogen Turns Handbags and Clothes Into Beaded Portraits

Sitting at her workspace with 20 containers of minuscule glass beads arrayed before her, Rachel Ellenbogen spends two days hand-beading each of her clutches. The final product is a purse that doubles as a realistic portrait of a woman in profile, glimmering tears streaming off the bag.

Since late 2020, the 23-year-old designer has been creating videos about her tambour embroidery work, a technique that affixes beads one at a time with a hooked needle. In May of this year, she posted a video marking the completion of a new experiment; a portrait clutch she’d been sketching out for months, titled “:(”. The video garnered thousands of likes almost immediately, and currently has almost five million views. Before she had really thought about selling the bags, people were asking to buy them.

Her beaded bags are rendered in three-dimensional detail, each chain of beads forming one colored layer in an almost topographic picture. Getting to a final design is only possible through painstaking trial-and-error.

First, she pencils out a sparse line-art face, then tries to imagine how each tiny pinpoint of the image would look as a single glass bead. The shadow of the eyelid, the sharp swoop of a cheekbone, and the softness of the lip are all picked out in subtly varied shades. The final result is almost photographic, but radiant and unearthly.

“The internet is such an interesting place. You never really know what’s going to hit and what won’t,” Ellenbogen says. “​​I made the bag, posted the video, put my phone down for 6 hours and then went back.” From there, she says things became “crazy and weird and amazing, but really surreal.” Commenters remarked on how they felt like they were “witnessing fashion history,” begged her to trademark her work fast, and exclaimed over and over at how beautiful the design was.

Ellenbogen has always been passionate about illustration, and drew hyper-realistic colored pencil portraits throughout high school. She picked up embroidery on her own as an extension of those interests. “I started using beads because I had a bad day at work one day. I walked past the bead store, and I just went in and was like, ‘I m going to go buy a ton of beads and add them to a dress.’”

While pursuing her BFA in Fashion Design at Parsons, Ellenbogen was referred by a professor to a specialized embroidery class in New York. That was four and a half years ago; since then, she’s been honing her craft.

After the video’s success, she put up an initial preorder run of six tearful portrait bags on her website, refreshing every few seconds to see if anyone would buy them. “The first run of six sold out in about a day,” she says. The next sold out in a day as well, and the third run sold out in 20 minutes.

Selling work that’s so time-consuming to create comes with its own hurdles. As Ellenbogen’s video migrated to other social media platforms, people commented back and forth about the $990 price tag. But Ellenbogen’s work is specialized, materials can be hard to source (the beads she uses ran out once, and are increasingly difficult to source in the quantities she needs), and each limited run of preorders takes weeks to produce.

She’s never actually taken stock of what goes into each item. On our Zoom call, she counts out a square inch of intricate beading and multiplies, estimating each bag requires about 3,000 beads. Fellow embroiderers have warned her to take care of her eyes and hands, and she’s already seeing the need for precautions, including compression gloves.

“I’m so incredibly grateful that I can do this, but I still needed to figure out a way to make money doing it,” she says. The moment her first bag sold allowed her to see a future in her field. “People actually wanting to buy my art for the price that I felt it was worth was a massive turning point for me.”

Ellenbogen has had the opportunity to do freelance embroidery for major design houses, including working with Alexander McQueen’s 2022 New York Fashion Week show and on Blake Lively’s Versace gown for the 2022 Met Gala. “It didn’t really set in what I was doing until I saw the pictures online of her in the dress,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’”

She’s also expanded her portrait designs: a heat-map bag in orange and blue; a luminous Venus bag weeping heart-shaped beads. In her free time, she’s trying to experiment with the craft. She recently finished a personal project months in the making: a multihued jacket and corset composed of vibrant, larger-than-life embroidered Vogue covers. She described it on Instagram as, “a good way for me to practice my portraiture.”