![]() Sampaio left the industry in 2014 after the experience. I remember I felt so bad and I felt that I was wrong and I didn’t deserve to work.” She told me that I wasn’t the right match for that brand because they knew that they were a conservative brand. ![]() “I remember they told me that I could be a model like Lea T. She’s yet to reveal the name of the label. “I was getting ready to shoot when they realized I was trans,” says Sampaio, who was fired on the spot. But on her first job, at 18, she witnessed institutional transphobia firsthand. At age 15 she traveled to Estacio University in her state’s capital city of Fortaleza, 45 minutes from her village by bus, to study fashion design, but while on campus she was routinely asked whether she was a model.Īfter much pressure, Sampaio decided to try it out. But originally, Sampaio wasn’t planning on becoming a model.Īs a teen, Sampaio had planned on being a designer. In the process, she etched her name in history as an intersex person of trans experience, paving the way for Brazilian models like Sampaio and Lea T, another groundbreaking trans model. Everyone was going crazy about her and her beauty.”Ĭlose’s career was vast, as she appeared on the cover of publications such as Playboy Brazil and worked with designers like Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler. “I just remember she was very famous in Brazil, and when I was a kid it was just her that I had to look up to. “When I was growing up I only had Roberta Close,” she says of the model, actress, and sex symbol who had once been deemed the most beautiful woman in Brazil. Instead, Sampaio was allowed to dream, pulling inspiration from people like Grace Jones who presented a genderless version of beauty and glamour. The fact that the town was small, she argues, may be why she didn’t experience the aggression some of her trans peers did: “Everybody knew me.” “I stayed strong in this and eventually they accepted.” She kept much of the same mind-set when confronting dissent at school, unwavering in who she knew herself to be. “I knew I wasn’t a boy, I knew I was Valentina,” she says simply of her childhood. Though the model was assigned male at birth, she maintains that she has always “known who I am and I showed that to everybody.” While those in her village might have cautioned her away from playing with dolls or called out her mannerisms that were thought to be feminine in a bid to eradicate them, Sampaio was unmoved. And that large family has been supportive of her career, for the most part. One of her grandmothers had eight siblings and the other had seven, so the idea of home (she lived with her grandparents before moving into her parents’ home as a preteen) has always been lively. Sampaio was the second of seven children growing up in Aquiraz, surrounded by ocean, mud, nature, and a large family. “It’s always the best moment of the year when I can come back. She’s visiting there from her hometown of Aquiraz - a village in the state of Ceará in northeastern Brazil that she says feels like a “big family” - in order to do a professional photo shoot for a few days. “It’s always amazing to come back home and stay close with and spend time with them,” Sampaio says on a Zoom call from São Paulo. Now back in her native Brazil, the trailblazing model is mostly twiddling her thumbs with family in the fishing village she was raised in. She was just getting started when the pandemic caused the world (and the fashion industry) to stop. Over the span of her short career, Sampaio has bounced around the fashion world - shooting in London, working in New York, and walking fashion shows in Milan. In the last five years alone she’s booked multiple Vogue covers and appeared in projects for Victoria’s Secret and Sports Illustrated, making history every step of the way. Valentina Sampaio is one of the most in-demand models out there. I created the illusion of fashion by utilizing things available around the house at the time, like dried rose petals and red wine, and arranged them on Valentina’s projected naked body.” At the time it was impossible to fly clothes for shoots. I turned my living room into a remote studio where I experimented with analog effects on the projected live feed of Valentina. quarantine: the sound of street protests and police sirens. "Throughout the call I could hear the waves on the coast of Brazil and the birds around her house set against my soundscape, L.A. “Valentina and I created this photo series remotely via " photographer Alex La Cruz says. ![]() Editor's Note: Given the unprecedented we are living under due to the ongoing global pandemic, this covershoot was similarly unprecented for Out.
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