Helena Christensen has occupied rare cultural space for three decades: an original ’90s supermodel who evolved into an acclaimed photographer, creative director, and humanitarian. In 2025 she is—simultaneously—the global artistic director for Danish design brand BoConcept, the creative director of niche fragrance house strangelove NYC, a co-founder of the creative studio Stærk & Christensen, and a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador focusing on refugee storytelling. This guide gathers current projects, credible biographical background, and where to follow her work now.
UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador
UNHCR appointed Christensen a Goodwill Ambassador in June 2019 after several years of volunteering and field visits. Her photography and visibility are leveraged to highlight displacement, build empathy, and fundraise.
UNHCR’s official page outlines that remit and continues to profile her ongoing participation in campaigns and missions. For audiences who mostly know Christensen from fashion, the UNHCR track offers an essential parallel narrative: pictures with purpose.
2025 design leadership: BoConcept global artistic director
In early 2025, industry press confirmed Christensen as BoConcept’s inaugural global artistic director. The role spans creative direction for shoots, fabric development, and collaboration on future collections.
It also fits her interior-aesthetic footprint—she’s long been identified with a layered, personal approach to home spaces. Coverage in Business of Home and Elle Decor details the scope and signals a sustained pivot into interiors alongside her image-making.
Creative director at strangelove NYC
Christensen’s title at the niche perfume house strangelove NYC isn’t honorary. Brand and industry pages describe hands-on work with founder Elizabeth Gaynes and master perfumer Christophe Laudamiel across product development, storytelling, and launches.
If you’re tracing her creative arc after fashion, this fragrance chapter shows the through-line: sensorial storytelling, collaboration with technical artisans, and a preference for projects with an intimate, crafted feel.
Stærk & Christensen: the creative studio
With artist-designer Camilla Stærk, Christensen co-leads Stærk & Christensen, a studio spanning fashion-adjacent objects, interiors collaborations, short-form film, and exhibitions.
The brand’s official site and social channels trace a long collaboration rooted in Danish design heritage, gothic motifs, and old-Hollywood glamour. In practice, S&C functions as a lab for cross-disciplinary experiments—jewelry, furniture, and visual essays that often feed back into commercial partnerships.
Model, photographer, and 2025 editorials
The fashion part of Christensen’s career hasn’t slowed. In mid-2025 she fronted the Harper’s Bazaar Arabia July/August cover package “Still Super,” a reminder that the original supermodel cohort is writing new rules for longevity.
Beauty editors also tapped her for a June 2025 Vogue video piece about a quick “Sexy Island” makeup look—half tutorial, half personality snapshot. For younger readers, those pieces are the handiest 2025 entry points.
Nylon and other creative entrepreneurship
One reason Christensen appears in so many “multi-hyphenate” profiles: she helped co-found Nylon magazine in 1999 and served as its original creative director.
That origin story matters because it foreshadowed a second act beyond modeling—editorial curation, photography commissions, and brand building. Twenty-plus years later, the same instincts underlie her roles at BoConcept and strangelove.
Her aesthetic: why her images feel different
Christensen’s photography leans toward mood and texture over sterile gloss—grain that feels tactile, natural light that picks up skin and fabric edges, and compositions that always preserve room for a subject’s interiority.
The result is fashion imagery that never reads as merely transactional; it frequently implies a story before and after the shutter. That sensibility grafts cleanly onto interiors and fragrance: spaces and scents are memory machines, and she treats them that way.
Helena Christensen in the home and lifestyle space
Recent press tours inside her Manhattan loft emphasize the layered, collected look—vintage photographs, ceramics, and textiles, arranged for warmth and memory rather than minimalism.
The BoConcept partnership makes sense in this context: translating personal, humanized design into broader creative direction. Expect 2025–2026 content heavy on texture—bouclés, heavy linens, woods with visible grain—and photography that feels lived-in rather than staged.
Motherhood, legacy, and the news cycle
Public attention often circles back to Helena as the mother of Mingus Reedus. When his name is in headlines, so is hers. It’s worth decoupling the two long enough to notice her own active slate: ambassador work, fragrance leadership, and editing/art direction roles that didn’t exist for most models of her generation.
That reinvention—and insistence on authorship behind the camera—explains why her career still feels forward-leaning in 2025.
Where to start if you’re new to her work
- Humanitarian lens: UNHCR’s Goodwill Ambassador page for Christensen—campaigns, visits, and photo essays.
- Design POV: 2025 announcements and interviews around her BoConcept role, especially pieces detailing fabrics and set direction.
- Scent storytelling: strangelove NYC’s “about” page and long-form brand profiles.
- Fashion now: recent magazine covers and beauty features (Bazaar Arabia; Vogue Beauty Secrets).
One official link to bookmark
For humanitarian work and updates, start here: UNHCR — Helena Christensen, Goodwill Ambassador.
Bottom line
Helena Christensen is not a nostalgia act. 2025 finds her steering creative across interiors and fragrance, shooting and appearing in editorials, and using her platform for UNHCR’s refugee storytelling. If you’re re-discovering her because of family news, don’t miss the ongoing work: it’s arguably the most interesting phase of her career.
