We recently connected with Brie E Henderson and have shared our conversation below.
Brie E, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
I love questions like this.
Like most of my friends, I have been drawing all my life. I’m from New York City and ever since I was a wee one, I have been exposed to the arts of all kinds. Fine Arts, Beaux-Arts, Neo-Classicism, Impressionism, Mannerism – I could go on and on. Some of my oldest sketchbooks from elementary school are filled with 18th-century costumes and even clothes inspired by what I saw in some of my favorite anime.
I went to a Fine Art High School where I truly fell in love with art history, but I wanted to work in the fashion industry as a fashion designer, have my own collection, and see beautiful models strut the runway in my creations. That was a dream that I held onto well into my college years, where I started out as a Fashion Design major. However, it was not meant to be as I struggled in my classes, failing tests and fought to understand the work that I had to do.
I did, in 2013 switch majors when I learned that I could take my skills to the animation industry as a character and costume designer.
Today in 2024, I am a full-time costume designer for both feature film animation as well as TV Animation. And though I work in animation, there are some incredible complexities and joys in my field in terms of deep cultural and even sub-cultural research and drawing from both reference and imagination. I am always looking to push the boundaries of what is possible, always looking to design something that the audience has yet to see on screen.
Being a costume designer for animation comes with its own fun loops and hoops to jump through. One must start their research with a deep well of respect towards the culture that is being explored as well as an understanding that goes beyond the surface level. It takes a great deal of time to learn about different groups of people, countries/places where costume can be seen as foreign and misunderstood, as well as periods in time where the costume was vastly different than what we generally see on the streets today.
I have had some incredible professors teach me how to read history through costume, how to understand garments, and how they’re constructed simply by looking and if possible, touching them. I have been very lucky to have taken a Textile Science class at FIDM in 2019 that taught me how to study fabric, to see its weave and its individual fibers. That professor taught me the importance of understanding the science behind how fabric is created from natural, manufactured, and synthetic fibers are made, colored, and even burned. All of these studies, while for real-life fabrics, have only made it easier to be able to discuss textiles for animation with my teams.
As a costume designer for animation, I get to push the boundaries of what costumes can do in terms of forwarding the story as well as breaking the limits of what can be animated. I get to create a character’s closet of clothes as I understand them, not only how they are in script, but how they are through my own fun thoughts of who they could be and how they’d present themselves to those around them.
Something that I live by is that one must learn to look at other cultures, and groups of people, outside of your own perspective, i.e. I, as an American, must set aside my own ideologies so that I may learn about someone else’s way of living through their own eyes, as best as I can.
Man do I love what I do haha.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Absolutely!
Immediately upon graduating from a fine art high school in the Bronx, NYC, my family helped me move out to San Francisco in 2011 where I started my journey of becoming a fashion designer with hopes of doing fashion illustrations for haute couture lines in Europe. I took my classes very seriously and though I’d even failed a class or two, I never let that stop me from working my way out of my freshman year into my sophomore year where I took some incredible courses such as Fashion History, Figure Drawing for Fashion, and Knitwear Design. Even then, in my early years of uni, I knew that I wanted to show the world my designs, and so, pulling all-nighters in the sewing studios and working on my assignments well until the sun came up quickly became my norm. Rest and relaxation were always a second thought.
However, in 2013, burnout hit me hard. I was getting sick all of the time and was frequently visiting the hospital because of how stressed out I was. The way that I was working had quickly become unsustainable and I was realizing that I was very unhappy with what I was doing in school. I had begun to question if the world of fashion was where I really wanted to belong.
And then…Frozen (Disney) came out, and that film changed everything for me. Right after I saw that film I called my mum and we had a conversation about whether or not I wanted to switch to a school like CalArts, she suggested I speak to my advisor and I did.
Over a single phone call, my advisor and I had discussed the Illustration major before she’d mentioned to me Visual Development and the work that they do in animation – designing concepts and ideas, colors, styles, and tones for film, TV, games, comics, and then some.
And thus, my advisor helped me to switch from the Fashion Design major to Visual Development.
I excitedly dove into my new major, taking everything from several art history courses, Nude and Clothed Figure Drawing, Advanced Perspective, Character Design, The History of Animation, and then some. I obsessed over my new classes, attended lectures from industry professionals, went to every figure drawing workshop that I could, and even made friends with some of the most talented students as I was deeply inspired by them and wanted to learn from them as well as my professors. I had gone from being an unhappy, overly stressed out Fashion Design student who was unsure of themselves and their place in the world of fashion, to a Visual Development student who knew exactly what they wanted to do and what studios they wanted to be a part of. Of course, I was still pulling my all-nighters and getting myself sick, however, this time I felt like I had a proper future ahead of me, and that it would all be worth it in the end.
I fought tooth and nail to learn how to be an artist for animation, gobbled up every Vis Dev course that I could, and befriended many of my professors to further learn from them and understand the world that I was so invested in.
Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like had I not seen Frozen, had I not had that conversation with my mum and school advisor. Sitting here now, reflecting on my school life and how it led me here…the only thing that I would change, would be the lack of sleep that I got. But I would do it all over again if I could.
I graduated in the summer of 2018 and moved straight to Los Angeles with one of my best friends and our two cats. I am proud to say that I am a costume designer for animation. I think and research like a fashion designer, and draw it all out for animation.
It is never, ever, too late to change and pivot your career, your life, your everything. you never know what may come of it, but at least you did it.
Are there any books, videos or other content that you feel have meaningfully impacted your thinking?
Oh of course!
A great deal of my knowledge comes from books! I believe I have over 50 books of various sizes and colors, ranging from Ancient China all the way to the decorative Byzantium.
While I do thoroughly enjoy browsing the internet for information, looking through online sources like blogs, museum archives, Pinterest, and other online sites, there really is nothing like cracking open a book and reading through the pages for information.
The very first book that I had purchased for one of my first feature films was The Collection of The Kyoto Costume Institute, Fashion History, From the 18th to the 20th Century. That book as well as What People Wore When, A Complete Illustrated History of Costume from Ancient Times to the Nineteenth Century for Every Level of Society, have greatly shaped my understanding of costume through the ages. I value these two books as they have opened my eyes to the fine details of what people wore throughout time. What People Wore When has a fascinating section on South India in the 19th century. There are several incredible, detailed illustrations of what men and women of all ranks wore. It is so detailed that it’s almost tactile and leads you to further your research through more books and other resources. Of all my books, it is those two that I turn to the most frequently.
Whenever I open up my Japanese Dress in Detail, a beautiful red book that goes into detail of the intricacies of Japanese garments from the 18th century to the present, I learn something new, I want to draw something new.
I am easily inspired by my many books and I truly believe that sitting with one of them over tea and reading through the pages for a few hours, changes one’s brain chemistry. You hold the information longer, understand it on a deeper level, and it is far easier to relay the same information with ease to those who may not understand it.
That being said. Books can be incredibly expensive and I am quick to admit that owning as many books as I do can be seen as elitest and far out of the realm for what some can afford. There are stores like Strand in NYC and The Last Book Store here in LA that sell a plethora of costume and fashion history books for well under 10 dollars if you take the time to hunt them down. There is also a wide variety of online sources that host PDFs of books as well as free access to online museum archives like those at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – the articles of clothing that they have preserved from centuries-old are mindblowing.
And don’t forget your local library and you never know what’s hiding in your neighborhood Little Free Library where you take a book and leave a book.
Knowledge is power. Asking questions will take you places. Being curious and picking up a book will change your life.
Contact Info:
- Website: behenderson.com
- Instagram: macromushroom
- Linkedin: Brie Henderson
- Twitter: @Briehenderson
- Other: IMDB – https://www.imdb.com/name/nm10617616/ (the great wolf pack is a series that I have never worked on/heard of. I’ve notified IMDB to delete it from my profile) ETSY – https://www.etsy.com/shop/WorksnThoughts