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Style Icon: Bree Nichols

Dave Steinfeld

August 25, 2025

@breenichols.nature

My introduction to Bree Nichols came sometime in the mid-2000s, when a former coworker included some songs by her band The Fitness on a mixtape. Imagine my surprise when, earlier this year, I found Nichols online and learned that the music thing was a one-off! Her first love has always been visual art. “I was asked—by an ex-boyfriend actually—to be in a band that he wanted to put together. He asked me because he knows my personality [and] he knew what I would be like fronting a band. [But] I’ve always made things.”

These days, Nichols—who was born in Washington state—is based in Brooklyn, where she oversees her brand, Nature Is an Object. She creates everything from custom T-shirts to jewelry. For the latter, Nichols uses a process called lost wax casting. “It’s a very ancient process,” she says when I ask her about it. “[During] the Roman [and] Egyptian periods, they were using lost wax casting. It’s basically a process where you take something that can be burnt out by hot metal.”

“I do every single step of the fabrication except for the casting,” she continues. “So I take my waxes into my foundry. They come back to me in their raw state and then I clean them up using all sorts of jewelry [and] metal-working techniques. Think of it as a positive/negative. The heat creates the negative that the metal fills.”

Her wonderfully named Sorori-Tees is basically a line of T-shirts with the names of important women on them—everyone from Gloria Steinem and Gilda Radner to Maya Angelou and Audre Lorde have adorned her shirts. “I get requests for custom ones all the time,” says Nichols. “It’s really more about the idea of cultural currency and less about my own preferences.” Still, there are some lines she won’t cross. When I ask if she would ever make a Marjorie Taylor Greene shirt if asked, she replies “Absolutely not!”

While Nature Is an Object is not exclusively for women, it’s certainly a female-centric company. “I love the company of women,” Nichols declares. “I try to find inspiration in most women and stay open to communities of women, so that I can hear what everyone is saying.”