Karoline Vitto (Q4896)
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Karoline Vitto is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Karoline Vitto |
Karoline Vitto is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
For Caçador-born Brazilian designer Karoline Vitto, there are three times of the year you should visit Rio de Janeiro: Carnival, New Year's Eve and the second of February. The latter marks the festa de Iemanjá, the day that worshippers dedicate floral offerings to the sea, in honor of the Afro-Brazilian goddess of the ocean. Earlier this year, Vitto found herself caught up in the celebrations on a stormy day, while shooting a video on a rocky coastal outcrop for her 2024 LVMH prize nomination. “It’s beautiful because the next day the sea washes all the flowers back,” Vitto explained. “For this collection I was thinking about that tempestuous energy,” she added. For of her concept, she imagined women as goddesses emerging from the swirl of the ocean.For Vitto’s debut standalone show on the London Fashion Week schedule—after two seasons showing under talent incubator Fashion East and a Dolce & Gabbana-sponsored SS24 turn in Milan—the designer continued to refine her body-baring and size-diverse mini-dresses, body suits and tops with “subtraction cutting.” Twisted folds and plunging drapes revealed splices of bare hip, navel and shoulder, and a blown-up photographic screen print on a long décolleté-revealing dress were used not for decorative effect but to “enhance silhouette and play a game of light and dark on the body.” The collection also saw a renewed focus on denim and tailoring.Vitto’s sculptural hardware details—used to emphasize, not hide the bulges and bumps of the body—were revamped as moldable two-point brooches in collaboration with São Paulo jeweler Carlos Penna. “You can bend the metal and choose how much of the body you reveal or cover,” Vitto explained.Vitto is one of a group of burgeoning talents, including Jawara Alleyne and Standing Ground’s Michael Stewart, who use humble fabrics, like jersey and viscose, to transformative effect. “I wanted to elevate the basic rib,” she said of a paneled black dress that clung to the body with sensuous hardware inserts. For SS25, Vitto, who works primarily with stretch deadstock, also used breathable bio-based fabric innovations, manufactured by Pyratex. Blush and candyfloss pink mini-skirts and dresses inspired by the Rio sky at dawn were crafted from SeaCell, a jersey-like fabric derived from seaweed.As body inclusivity has taken a backward turn on the runway, Vitto’s smile-inducing celebration of the breadth of the female form felt more urgent than ever.
In her Smithfield studio (a space sponsored by the Paul Smith Foundation, which Vitto currently shares with Paolo Carzana and Paolina Russo), the designer largely samples her pieces on a mannequin in a size UK16, and creates trousers which an adjustable fit from a size UK14 to UK20. She also incorporates days of model street casing into her show preparation. Included in her line-up for SS25 were make-up artist Raisa Flowers, ’90s plus size model Angellika Morton, who responded to Vitto's casting call on Instagram from America, and the artist and photographer Fernanda Liberti, a friend of the designer’s from Brazil, who has walked in all of her shows. Vitto has been inspired by the path of fellow Royal College of Art graduate Sinead O’Dwyer, who used August’s Copenhagen catwalk to champion disabled bodies in fashion. “For me, construction is about drawing attention to the body that is underneath,” Vitto said. “The woman always becomes the highlight.”
15 September 2024
For the past few seasons, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana have hosted an emerging designer on the last day of the Milan shows. They lend their atelier and leftover materials and provide a show space. The young talents get a global platform, and the audience, in turn, gets to see new ways of thinking.Karoline Vitto, the London-based up-and-comer they chose this season, has a lot to teach the fashion establishment. She’s part of an emerging class of women designers that includes Ester Manas in Paris and Collina Strada’s Hillary Taymour in New York who reject the narrow perspectives that still shape so many other runways, leaving them woefully one-dimensional. Led by Ashley Graham, Vitto’s cast was proof positive that beauty comes in many sizes besides 00. While prepping for the show backstage, Vitto said, “I’m really hoping this helps the industry maybe reconsider how they’ve been working. We have this amazing cast of curve models. For me, this is major, and I just really hope that other brands can start considering some of these girls as well.”A graduate of the Royal College of Art and an alum of London’s Fashion East platform, Vitto has another thing going for her: a distinct design vocabulary. The looped metal links that knit together hip-spanning cutouts or curve around the breasts and attach to supportive bra straps make her body-conscious pieces recognizable across the room. Having used deadstock in her previous collections, she was comfortable using Dolce & Gabbana’s castoffs. The charms suspended from the ladder cutouts on a stretchy LBD were from the Italian designers’ trimmings supply. Riffing on the motif of cutouts, she also worked with machine knits, programming the patterns so that the opaque and sheer elements highlighted their wearer’s curves.Domenico Dolce approved. “Katie Grand introduced Karoline to us and we loved her sensibility. It’s so sensual, so sexy; she has such a clear vision. It’s a new point of view about the fashion world.”
24 September 2023