Karoline Vitto wants to celebrate everything we've been told to hide

Style Points is a weekly column on how fashion intersects with the rest of the world.

Growing up in Brazil at a time when models seemed to be the country's main export, Karoline Vitto didn't really see herself represented on the catwalk. The favorite body shape at the time was, as she describes it, “that hourglass silhouette, where nothing moves. Nothing is soft. Everything is difficult."

Although "Brazil is a very multicultural country, it was still very Eurocentric and the standards of beauty were very strict in this respect", she recalls. "I couldn't see myself, my friends, my mother, in any of those references." When she started her fashion studies, “something was missing. For me, it was when I changed my body that I showed the work. That's when it all clicked."

A look from Karoline Vitto's Spring 2023 show as part of Fashion East.

Chris Yates

This breakthrough came after she moved to the UK and started to feel more comfortable in her own body. As a Masters student in fashion at the Royal College of Art, she decided to make her work 'an investigation' into body image and 'why I was so obsessed with having a certain type body at the time". These ideas fueled her eponymous label, which she showed as part of the Fashion East collective in London this season. Working with casting director Maddie Østlie, she sought out models with a strong gait and a confident personality. There was another condition: height. "No zeros, no twos and no fours," she said briskly. (His line runs from UK 8-28, or US size, 4-24.)