At the end of every season, a plethora of reports gather the statistics regarding diversity across all four fashion weeks. After a wave of seeing a change in size inclusivity a few years ago, last season especially highlighted the disappointing drop in non-sample size models. On Saturday morning, Brazilian designer Karoline Vitto presented her latest collection, “Thaw”, and shed light on an overlooked reason behind the drop in diverse casting. “The weight of body diversity should not rest on a handful of designers,” read the shownotes. 

Following a successful run post-graduation, first at Fashion East and then as a NEWGEN recipient, last year Vitto took a season off-schedule. It is true that when she, or the small handful of her peers known for consistently casting beyond sample size, step back from the schedule, the numbers around visible body diversity tend to drop. “No one's going to make a connection,” she explains, prior to her show. “They're not going to realise that it's the emerging designers that are holding it.” Rather than making a “I'm back” statement, for AW26, Vitto used the transition from winter into spring as a glimmer of optimism. “I just wanted people to start feeling a bit hopeful,” Vitto explains.

Since launching her brand almost six years ago, Vitto has injected hope into the London scene and thus become a staple brand in the city. Known for sculpting around curves through construction rather than concealment, Vitto's work is rooted in her background in architecture. “I've always been interested in how things are made,” she explains. “It led me to architecture, but when I was there, I had friends doing fashion and that sounded a lot more exciting.”

As the BFC’s official partner, Pull&Bear’s Canvas For Creativity project calls upon BFC NEWGEN designers to develop a capsule collection. Following the success of Lueder’s collaboration for SS26, this season, Vitto was the BFC NEWGEN designer enlisted to translate her work on a scale different from ever before. Alongside body-hugging jersey dresses with strategic ruching, the collection features a slightly silver-washed twin denim set with side zip adjusters that can be opened for a lower, looser fit, transformable knitwear pieces that can be worn multiple ways, and two menswear looks marking her first move into the category.

Shot by Carlota Guerrero, the campaign was a full-circle moment for the designer. “One of my dreams was to work with Carlota,” she explains, from the set of the shoot with Guerrero in Barcelona. “When they proposed her, I was like, are you for real? 100,000% yes. I’ve been such a huge fan of her work.” The campaign and collection mark not just a first for Vitto, but for Pull&Bear, which extended its sizing to up to a 2XL for the first time in the brand’s history.

Below, Vitto talks us through working with Pull&Bear, her architectural approach to design and finding middle ground in collaborations. 

For the Pull&Bear collection specifically, what initially drew you to this project?

Karoline Vitto: The project is a collaboration between the BFC NEWGEN designer program and the Pull&Bear team. I’m really glad that I’m part of NEWGEN. They reached out to ask if I would be interested, and I immediately said yes because of the opportunity to translate my work to a scale that is available to more people. We’re a very, very small team, but working with Pull&Bear just presented itself as an opportunity for me to do [what we do] on a larger scale, with a much larger team that is very specialised, and that’s such a rare opportunity for an emerging brand. 

If the scale is completely different, then the reach must be too. 

Karoline Vitto: Yeah, it’s completely different. Sometimes when we are working on our own collections, there are so many things we want to do and push, but we run into logistics. First, you’re in London, and there’s only so much that you can do from there. And then [there’s the] supply chain. For a brand like Pull&Bear, which has so many suppliers around the world, they have all these connections already. They have already mapped everything out. The blueprints there, it does make designing so much more fun. 

Your work has always been quite sculpted around the body. Do you feel like studying architecture informs how you make clothes?

Karoline Vitto: Definitely, because I’m not much of an embellisher. We have the metal and all of that in the clothes, but I’m just so much more about the shapes. With what we do in London, I’m still the pattern cutter for most of it because it’s the part I enjoy the most. For me, sometimes some of the designs kind of start from there. I don’t draw very much. I prefer to go to the mannequin and work on the shape. The real thrill for me is to transform that shape into a digestible pattern that can take it to my seamstress, and she will understand. When you see it on the catwalk, sometimes it might be a somewhat simple-looking silhouette, in jersey or a drape, but there’s always an element of construction behind it. 

The term ‘body-led’ is used a lot when it comes to your work, which makes a lot of sense with how you approach it. 

Karoline Vitto: It is from the body and for the body. Obviously, we work with mannequins, but the mannequin is tweaked to look more human, rather than a wooden sculpture. Whenever I start from drawing, I do not feel as happy with the design as I do when I start from the actual manipulation of it. With the Pull&Bear collaboration, I’m really happy with how it went, because we actually started from material, from garments, from a mannequin, which is so rare to do in a situation like this. 

There’s always a compromise that comes with collaboration. Working with a machine a lot bigger than what you’re used to, how did you find what works for both them and what feels authentic to your brand? 

Karoline Vitto: I think whenever people talk about my brand, one of the conversations that always comes up is sizing. We work with extended sizes at Karoline Vitto; Pull&Bear did not work with extended sizes until this point. When we started working together, I proposed that we extend the size range, and they said yes, which is amazing. I cannot even begin to explain the work that goes into extending a size range for a brand that is already operating on a certain size. When you’re starting a completely fresh brand, it’s almost easier to extend sizes because you do not have a backlog of patterns and shapes. Somewhere like Pull&Bear already has a library of patterns and fittings, so then if you extend that, you’re basically shaking the core of the foundation of how a place works.

What most people do not realise is that when you grade from, say, a UK six to a UK 12/14, the grading styles move. It’s usually four to five cm per size, but after that point, our bodies change so much, especially for women, because we carry weight differently – boobs, thighs, shapes, etc. If you just keep following the same logic of plus five centimetres, you’re going to end up with something sized up, but that does not fit extremely well. It was a bit of a merge of processes and a new way of working for me. I’m really glad that they went for it, because it’s just so much work, and I’m pretty sure I put the pattern cutters under a lot of stress. 

That’s so major when you think of the ripple effect and how someone who ordinarily has not been able to go into a store and buy something there now will be able to.

Karoline Vitto: I’m really happy with that. Obviously, thinking about the scale of it and the fact that the distribution is a lot wider than what we do, what we developed with the clothes was a lot of adjustments and alterations that we do at my brand as well. Zips are placed in ways where, depending on how you wear them, they’re going to give you an extra five centimetres. Or the way you tie something is going to make it narrower or wider.  We have all of these little tweaks that, if you try the piece on and you mess with it a little bit, you see that it falls differently depending on what you do.

Is there a piece or part of the collection you particularly enjoyed seeing come to life?

Karoline Vitto: I want to say the menswear, because we have not done menswear before. It was really exciting for me. For this collection, we have two menswear sets. Also, with the women’s, I love this twin denim set. It’s slightly silver-ish, and the trousers have these zip adjusters on the side, which you can open so it becomes low waist and baggy. I always wanted to do a paper bag waist that works for curves, because it never really does. 

Have you been watching or listening to anything you feel like has influenced this collection?

Karoline Vitto: When I work on shows, I never kind of have the story first. I always have some ideas first, and then they start to come together, mostly based on music. I want to choose the show soundtrack early on. When I find the perfect music and the perfect feeling that I want people to feel, that’s when I’m like this is the story I’m telling. With this collection, I was listening to a lot of 90s, some techno, house and mixing it together. But then it went into a bit more of a cold atmosphere in terms of music as well. The music that we’re picking for the show is gonna tie everything together.

With your main collection and this special project debuting simultaneously, how did you ensure a seamless integration between the two?

Karoline Vitto: I did not try to make them merge in terms of shapes or ideas. What I did try to match is the colour story. That is something that I have to decide early on, mostly because at Karoline Vitto, we work with mostly dead stock materials. So it is what it is; we don’t dye things or produce things. If 14 meters are available, it’s 14 meters, and that’s it. I like to have that sort of restriction there, because it also helps us understand what we can do with certain fabrics. The colour is kind of a story that we have to build early on. 

In terms of the actual design, it is going more in the direction of what we normally do, in terms of drape and jersey. We’re working with less hardware this season. I’m really trying to make the sort of like the drape do the work of the hardware. The story that I want to tell basically came from a piece of music that I was listening to, which is called "I miss the way you swim". It just made me feel and think about this idea of defrosting – the end of winter and beginning of spring, and the kind of limbo state where you start to build hope again. I didn’t want a winter collection to feel like winter; I wanted it to feel like the end of winter.

What advice would you give to your younger self when you were first starting your career?

Karoline Vitto: I’ve always done things without being 100% prepared for it. I felt I wasn’t ready to do my first show, but I applied to Fashion East. I got the place, and I was like oh my god, now I have to do a show. What am I doing? But then I did it. It was amazing. There’s so much that you only learn by doing. I do not think you’re ever going to be 100% ready for something; having a bit of courage is really important. The reality is that there are a lot of people, students and interns who are afraid of applying for a job or reaching out to someone they want to work with. Of course, there’s going to be a lot of nos, and people’s time might be limited, but there’s nothing bad that can come out of trying sometimes.

Head to the gallery above to check out BTS from the shoot, the campaign and looks from the show.