Brazilian Designer Karoline Vitto Highlights Her Brand’s Dedication to Body Positivity on Milan Fashion Week Runway

Each year during Milan Fashion Week, luxury label Dolce & Gabbana sponsors one young creative with an all-expenses paid runway show to highlight their talent, passion and mission.

This year’s designer, Karoline Vitto, brought diversity, inclusion and body positivity to the runway on Sept. 24. Her work is inspired by the fashion culture and unattainable beauty standards she experienced growing up in Caçador, a small city in southern Brazil. Vitto graduated from the Royal College of Art with a masters in fashion and runs a size-inclusive womenswear studio in London.

“Accentuating the curves and celebrating the folds,” reads the brand’s Instagram bio.

Her latest body positive spring-summer 2024 show debuted at the Dolce & Gabbana Casa building with supermodel Ashley Graham as the runway’s opener.

“You should be crying, it was incredible! We just made history,” the 2016 SI Swimsuit cover star told Vitto after the show. “It feels normal. You want diversity? This is diversity. More designers should be doing this. We need more curves on the runway, we need to have this be the normal. If I’m feeling normal on a runway with this many girls, it means that there’s something that doesn’t feel normal on runways everywhere else.”

Each runway piece was carefully handcrafted with the intention of showcasing the beauty and reality of women’s bodies—rolls, curves, bulges, twists, turns, lines and all.

“Just like jewelry accentuates areas of the body, the metal elements bring attention to areas we feel self-conscious about. I normally start by thinking about how much of the body is going to be shown or contoured,” she explained to Vogue. “Some of the [models] were street cast, others I’d been following on Instagram for a long time. I can’t wait for bigger shows in the future, featuring even more amazing women.”

Vitto chose to stray far from the “sample size” and the lineup of models in her show started at a size 10 and went up to size 24.

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