Just a year ago, the residents of the Ciudadela neighborhood in the coastal town of Tumaco, Colombia, knew Valentina Castro Rojas for being a girl with a talent for braiding Afro hair.
Aside from that, her 5-foot and 30-inch height had drawn attention at a few fashion shows and beauty pageants at her school and in her neighborhood.
But no one had imagined that, at barely 18 years old, Valentina was going to be parading for the luxury brand that sells the most in the world.
Louis Vuitton is a well-known but remote brand for the vast majority of Tumaqueños. The only store of that firm in Colombia is in Bogotá, more than a thousand kilometers from Valentina’s house. Its products are accessible to a tiny minority.
Before her life changed thanks to an Instagram message from a talent scout for a Dominican modeling agency, Valentina charged between $4 and $12 dollars to do hairstyles in her neighborhood. He did them at home and at his address.
Now she parades wearing multi-thousand-dollar outfits in such iconic places as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris or the Italian island of Isola Bella in Lake Maggiore.
“One of the things that I admire the most about the other models and also about myself is making it look easy, because it is not.. It may be very cold, it may be very hot, your feet may hurt, but you go out as if nothing had happened”, Valentina tells BBC Mundo now from the perspective of an international model.
After several months traveling around Europe, he returned to Tumaco and is in his last year of high school at a school near his home while studying English virtually.
He lives with his mother, who sells products by catalog, and his sisters. Her dad is a fisherman.
Her life before modeling
Tumaco, where Valentina was born and raised, is a small city on the Pacific Coast of Colombia near the border with Ecuador. It has a little more than 250 thousand inhabitants. 4 out of 5 are Afro-Colombians.
It is a corner of Colombia where the harshest facets of the country’s reality have crystallized: poverty and violence.
According to the last census, more than half of the inhabitants of Tumaco live below the multidimensional poverty line. 3 out of 10 have their basic needs unsatisfied.
Valentina, however, describes her as “peaceful.”
“Even though we don’t have all the resources and the streets aren’t paved, we are all very united,” he explains when describing his neighborhood.
“From Tumaco, I really like the beach and the sunsets, the food, I like many things.”
The braids in her life are not something anecdotal.
Getting her hair done with her sister is one of her favorite childhood memories, she says.
“I am simple in the way I dress, but not in my hair. I really like my hair, I like to change my hair looksI don’t like to have my hair still”, Valentina explains to me.
It was precisely through an account in which she shared hairstyles that Sebastián Bedoya, a talent scout for the Nefer Models agency, contacted her.
an unexpected message
Bedoya is dedicated to looking for models in Colombia that meet a certain height and a particular profile of the face (similar to that of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti).
In November, he found Valentina on social media and sent her a message asking if she would like to be a model.
“I didn’t have a lot of followers, but they really liked the photos and poses I posted. I imitated many photos of how other models posed. I took photos myself with the front camera”, says Valentina.
With much suspicion, she told him that she was interested.
But when he told his mom about the messages, she too was immediately suspicious. “Nobody thought that was true”evokes Valentina.
The ghost of women who are promised work abroad and end up being trafficked clouded Valentina’s fantasy of having a modeling career.
The distrust continued for several weeks, but Valentina’s insistence was such that her mother agreed to speak with Bedoya and then with Nileny Dippton, a well-known ex-beauty queen and Dominican businesswoman who runs Nefer Models.
They arranged a trip for Valentina and her mother to Santo Domingo to start the career of the young woman from Tumaco on the catwalks, even without knowing that the giant French brand Louis Vuitton was on the scene.
“Until we got there, we were a little calmer”says Valentina.
A 180 degree turn
At that moment, Valentina took on the difficult task of learning to be an international model in just weeks.
“It was a very drastic change. The food was very different. She had to eat healthy. It was very difficult for me, really. I started exercising, running, training, drinking a lot of water. From the first day I arrived, I had no rest”.
Before that trip, which was the first time she had left Colombia, Valentina had never worn heels.
The change in his habits was so sudden that it ended up taking its toll on him.
A few months later, on a flight from Italy to England, Valentina began to feel like she couldn’t breathe.
“I had a very strict diet that affected me a lot. He was hurting me. I fainted on the plane and I had to go to the hospital, ”she says. “I have never been sick like this. I was getting malnourished.”
According to his words, the doctor recommended that he “do not eat very healthy.”
“I am used to eating a lot. Since then I have been eating my normal food”, says Castro.
His landing on the catwalks
Not even four months had passed since the first exchange of messages when Valentina received the news that his debut would be in the autumn-winter show of Louis Vuitton during fashion week in Paris last March.
“I was very sure of myself, I felt very happy, very content,” she says.
Now that she knows the world of modeling better, she says that she has heard many stories of models who are excited that they are going to walk for big brands, but at the last minute it does not happen.
It was not his case.
The moment of the parade in the renowned Musée d’Orsay arrived and Valentina was the second to emerge with her hair braided and a black structured jacket.which was one of the centerpieces of the collection.
Valentina describes the catwalk as a fight against her own mind.
“There came a time when I was going up a staircase, I stepped on the edge of a step and almost fell. I started to get upset and my mind told me that I was going to fall, but I continued”.
Magazine Vogue called the collection designed by Nicolas Ghesquière “the epitome of French elegance.”
The guest list included superstars like Zendaya and Jaden Smith.
“Yes, I have met celebrities, but the problem is that I don’t memorize the names. They have some weird names. I am not a person who is a fan of someone. That they ask me for the photo, ”she says and laughs.
About her relationship with the other models, she says: “she smiled a lot and tried to include me even though she didn’t understand them. If they laughed, I laughed, even though I didn’t even understand what they were talking about.
“I also met other Latina models, but I did feel like I was excluded. That hurt a little bit,” she says.
After the show, she was chosen to take promotional photos and videos for the collection.
Valentina has continued to work exclusively for Louis Vuitton ever since.. In April she walked in South Korea and in May in Italy.
About his show in Seoul, he says that “when I was going to go out, the music changed. And my clothes were like flying and everything looked super cute. I felt like a superhero.”
His return to Tumaco
Valentina has spent almost all of 2023 outside of Colombia. She returned less than a month ago to finish school.
According to her, going back was almost an impossible missionbecause whenever the date of his flight approached, new photo sessions and campaigns abroad appeared.
“Right now I feel good because I’m at home resting, I feel happy.”
Since she returned, dozens of young people have contacted her because they dream of following in her footsteps.
“There are many girls who want to be models, but I don’t like to sell them that dream.”
Nevertheless, Valentina has already agreed with her agency Nefer Models to do a casting of new models in Tumaco. And she’s helping some young women she sees potential prepare for that opportunity.
Also, she will travel again in September to the headquarters of her agency in the Dominican Republic and hopes to continue being an exclusive model for Louis Vuitton, although for now she does not have a long-term contract with the brand.
Besides, Valentina dreams of being a hairdresser and having a hairdresser. And she doesn’t miss an opportunity to talk about her hair.
She says that after years of chemical straightening, she and the women in her family are going back to wearing their afro hair.
“I think it looks very pretty and you can do a lot more with your Afro than straight hair. I feel that he looks very cute. And it is also what represents us”, just as she now represents Tumaco on the glamorous catwalks of the world.
Keep reading:
* Demi Rose steals looks wearing a tight dress that highlights her hips
* She was abandoned as a baby in an orphanage for being albino and became a Vogue model
* She became famous on Instagram for being a model and actually belonged to a gang of thieves
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