MANHATTAN – On the morning of Friday, Sept. 5, I pushed myself to make a new friend and asked a fellow Catholic to grab a coffee after Mass.  

Her name is Natalie Zadrima.  

I noticed her sitting a few pews ahead of me, modestly dressed and effortlessly fashionable, and hoped to get some tips. After Mass, we walked out together, and before I knew it, we were sitting in a nearby café, talking like old friends.  

When I asked Natalie about her fashion sense, she described it as “a mix of classic, girly, and timeless.” Her style draws inspiration from two unlikely fashion icons of ‘90s television: Rachel Green from “Friends” and Charlotte York from “Sex and the City,” which she quickly clarified isn’t a show she tries to model her life after.  

“Obviously, not a great example as a show,” Zadrima said. “But fashion-wise, that character — Charlotte— wears very classic styles — ’90s, fun and girly, and I like a lot of old J. Crew and Ralph Lauren.” 

She said it’s important to her to show that modesty doesn’t mean sacrificing style — “Dressing modestly and appropriately is the epitome of fashion.”  

Zadrima runs a TikTok account (@nataliezadrima), which she describes on its home page as a “Digital Diary of a Catholic Girl in New York.” The account has garnered her a lot of attention, including new friends. She said she started her account after graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 2022. She has since gained over 8,500 followers and almost 450,000 likes on the page.  

“Being Catholic is the most important thing to me,” Zadrima said. “It shapes my life in every way and in every aspect. It was kind of natural that I brought it to social media.”  

Apart from using her TikTok as a digital diary, she said she doesn’t necessarily have an “end goal” for the page. She said she wants to share with others how uplifting the Catholic faith is and encourage others to celebrate their faith out loud.  

“I think that it’s important that I can share my life and show that you can be cool and have cool experiences and do these things while being Catholic and keeping consistent with your faith and values,” Zadrima said.   

Her content is gentle and thoughtful — snapshots of her outfits, moments from her workday, visits to churches like St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown, which she said is her home parish, and even glimpses of her favorite saint, Pope St. John Paul II. 

She also shared that living her faith comes naturally in part because of her Albanian roots and the examples set by the women in her family, like her grandmother and mother.  

“In my culture, every Catholic family has a designated feast day that they celebrate,” Zadrima said. “On my mom’s side, we celebrate St. Nicholas on Dec. 6th, and on my dad’s side, we celebrate St. Paul the Apostle in June. And then all the other families we’re c

lose to — friends, extended relatives — they all have their own feast days too, so we celebrate those a lot.” 

In addition to her TikTok page, Zadrima has an Instagram and a YouTube account, where she will soon post about her trip to Brussels, Belgium, where she visited the national Basilica of the Sacred Heart, one of the largest churches in the world.  

Zadrima said she has always been interested in content creation and video editing. Recently, she and her mother launched their own media company, Immaculata Media, which debuted in July with a cooking show called Countdown to Delicious.  

“We named it Immaculata Media as an ode to our faith and because we always want to have God at the center of everything,” Zadrima said. “We hope to bring content that is uplifting. This will be content everyone can watch, and they won’t have to worry about the content going against their values.” 

Meeting Zadrima after Mass, I genuinely feel like I made a friend today — a friend who can help me stick to my Catholic values. Before we said goodbye, she invited me to join her for a youth Mass at St. Patrick’s. Of course, I said I’d be happy too. 

Zadrima isn’t trying to impress anyone. She’s not chasing trends. She’s just living out her faith with grace and intention — and showing that being Catholic in a modern world doesn’t have to feel like a contradiction.