Artist Takes on Fashion: Expressing Herself on Paper and Her Clothes

By Lilly Phillips

You’ve probably seen her painting murals in the hallway, but have you noticed her fashionable fits? Brigitta Niedringhaus-Schultz, otherwise known as Bri, is not only an artist but also shows us how fashion can be a type of art too.

Now what is this style called? Bri says she’s not quite sure, and that’s what’s so great about it. Bri isn’t following trends or sticking to certain styles, her sense of fashion is an accumulation of many different styles and trends, from multiple different eras of fashion. Anything earthy, witchy, or even “y2k” is fair game when she goes shopping. Her artsy and eclectic style is influenced by many different things, such as Pinterest and social media, and also just her personal character and who she is as an artist.

When it comes to thrifting and wearing environmentally friendly fashion, she is a role model in fashion.

“I don’t really like fast fashion, and I’m definitely trying to move away from it.”

Is what Bri says about her fashion sense and it is a suggestion we should all live by.

She says she gets a lot of her clothes from thrift stores, vintage stores, her mom’s and grandma’s closets, and even makes her own clothes. About making her own clothes, she said that she learned how to do this from a young age. She went to a Waldorf school, where they teach you many skills, such as art, music, and real life skills like sewing.

However, her interest in this really took off in middle school; when we were all stuck at home during COVID, Bri was expressing her artistic creativity through fashion. She learned about “thrift flips” and took vintage clothes she got and sewed them to make them her own.

Seeing that she’s an artist, her artistic skill has a lot of influence on how she views the world and creates her own world in fashion.

“It’s just one of the ways that I express myself,” says Bri, and we definitely see how her creativity shines through when it comes to fashion. The outfit we see her wearing above consists of a shirt she made herself, a pair of jeans from goodwill, accompanied by paintings of constellations that she did on her jeans. This outfit is a perfect example of how Bri is expressing herself, not only on a canvas, but on her clothes.