Hoshont’omba shows her culture on the runway

Twenty-six-year-old Bridgette Hoshont’omba is making a name for herself in design and modeling.

Hoshont’omba recently modeled for the Teton Trade Cloth Fashion Summit at the First Americans Museum (FAM) in Oklahoma City and a recent Inter-Tribal Council fashion show. The creator of Issitohbi Designs, she is also a print, accessory, and beadwork artist.

Her designs will debut at this month’s Oklahoma 4 Directions MMIP Conference in Lawton for their Red Gala & Fashion Show.

She is also involved in Matriarch, promoting the social welfare of Native women through a cooperative learning experience called Creative Indigenous Challenge. She works with NOISE (Northeastern Oklahoma Indigenous Safety and Education) to design missing person flyers and creates social media content on a volunteer basis. Hoshont’omba is also a student of Fashion Design Essentials at Parsons Fashion School.

A resident of Shawnee, Oklahoma, she describes herself as a proud woman from the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma who wants to represent her people through a modern lens. She hopes to continue learning new skills, grow her audience, and create Choctaw learning materials for small children. “While I design and model because I love doing it, I also want to do work that means something.”

When asked what advice she would give Choctaw youth who want a future in the arts, she said, “Just go for it. You’ve got this. I know it sounds cliche, and as a youth, I absolutely hated it when people would tell me things like that because I wanted to know in-depth, how. But now that I’m older I get it.” She continued, “We all start somewhere. We all work on different timelines. Social media is a great place for sharing what you’re doing and getting advice from your peers, especially the groups on Facebook. DeviantArt is wonderful as well. Reddit has forums for just about everything.” She encourages readers to reach out to people they admire. She said, “Not everyone will reply, and sometimes you might get a dismissive response from someone you really admire; but there is no shortage of kind people out there in the niche you create art in. You just have to find them.”

Hoshont’omba stressed, “Really, I just want to show the youth that they can do what I’m doing because when I was younger, I needed someone like me to show me I could do these things; now I can be that for someone else.”

Issitohbi Designs can be found on Instagram at @issitohbi, on Facebook or at issitohbi.com.