Collections

This section presents a selection of custom pieces made in the Elias Gurrola studio. The work includes costumes, wedding and special occasion looks, and pieces made for performance and stage, each designed and constructed for a single client.

Custom work begins at $650, with most commissions ranging from $650 to $2,500 depending on design and materials. Pieces are made to measure in Philadelphia, with fittings in the studio or remotely. Most commissions are completed within 4 to 8 weeks of the first fitting.

To request a custom piece, use the Customs Request form.

Perceptions is an interdisciplinary performance piece blending dance, costume, and storytelling to explore the fluid, layered nature of human perception. Told entirely from a first-person perspective, it unfolds inside the mind of its creator — a lived, vulnerable, immersive journey through anxiety, heartbreak, loss, and healing.

The performance unfolds in four acts, each marking a different relationship with reality:

I. Your Reality is Not Reality
II. You Are Altering Your Reality
III. Your Reality is Not the Only Reality
IV. This Time, Your Reality Is Reality

Together, these chapters invite the audience into a deeply personal narrative that resonates with universal human experience.

The inspiration for this collection came in two parts. It's called "American Beauty" because I wanted to focus on all of the people who make America beautiful — no matter who they are or how they identify. We live in what can feel like a very isolating time, where we're being pushed apart for our differences, and I wanted to comment on that with my S/S collection.

The second part is color. Inspired by the printing term CMYK — Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK — I wanted to use color to represent labels. If I'm "Magenta," let's say, then society already has an idea of what Magenta looks like, what Magenta acts like — and all of those ideas are just imaginary constructs. I wanted to show that Magenta has many faces, many genders, many looks, and so many beautiful aspects we may not be seeing yet.

Whether you're Magenta, Yellow, Navy, or Lavender — my own brutal reinterpretation of the printing code — there is so much more beauty and magic to be found in others. And when we paint that picture together, with all of our colors, we create our American story: our American Beauty.

The inspiration for this collection is dreams. It's called "Somnium", the Latin word for dream, because I wanted to explore the world we live in when we're asleep, the one place where every one of us is completely free. In dreams there are no labels, no rules, no gravity. The people we love come back to us. The things we're afraid of show up wearing strange faces. And sometimes we wake up holding an answer we couldn't find while we were awake.

For this collection I collaborated with my friend Morgan Winter, who painted directly onto the garments. Her surreal eyes watch from the fabric the way images watch us in dreams, familiar and strange at the same time. She painted a clear jacket splattered with paint, so the color floats on the body like something you almost remember, and details like that run through the whole collection. Nothing is quite solid, and nothing is only one thing.

Whether your dreams are the ones you have asleep or the ones you're chasing awake, they're the most honest version of you. When we let ourselves dream, really dream, we create our own Somnium.

Photography by Joe Kramm

The womenswear of Somnium I designed entirely on my own. If the collection is a dream, these are its most vivid moments: whimsical colors that feel playful on the surface and emotional underneath, magenta pinks, sky blues, lavender, and deep greens, worn close to the body and made to move.

Texture tells the story here. A skirt hand knitted from upcycled materials, its dense and shifting surface like a dream you can almost read. Sculptural panels laced together with ribbon and cord. Lace against skin, faux fur at the collar, appliqué blooming across a cap. Every piece is cut and sewn by hand, one of one, so no two women wear the dream the same way.

In dreams we are never only one thing. Neither is she.

Creep is a collection about feeling like an outsider. It is about wanting to be a part of the world around us, studying how everyone else seems to belong, and trying to disguise yourself as one of them. And getting it wrong.

The disguises miss in unusual ways. Dressing done wrong on purpose and by accident: proportions off, pieces worn the way they were never meant to be worn, formality in the wrong place, beauty with a glitch in it. The harder the look tries to pass as normal, the more clearly it tells the truth.

Because the secret of Creep is that the disguise failing is the most honest part. Everyone has stood at the edge of the room rehearsing belonging. This collection dresses that moment, and loves it for exactly what it is.

Hardcore began with a question: what do we wear when the world feels dangerous? I wanted to create costumes that protect the person inside them and scare away anything that means them harm. Armor you can live in, built by hand.

Each piece is a shield with a pulse. Hard surfaces and soft bodies. Spikes, structure, and weight where the world presses in, and beauty where it counts, because the point was never to hide. The point was to be seen and untouchable at the same time.

Worn together, the looks became a tribe: beautiful and scary people, bound not by blood but by the decision to protect each other. Hardcore is for anyone who has ever had to be their own bodyguard. Put it on, and you do not stand alone.

Re/Fractions is the first Elias Gurrola menswear collection. The work is a study of the medium itself, focused on how fabrics behave under light and on the body.

The collection uses high shine materials and contrasting textures throughout: gloss against matte, smooth against rough, fluid against structured. Each piece tests a material's movement, surface, and effect when worn.

Re/Fractions marks the starting point of the label's collections.