|
 Brazilian clothing designer Lino Villaventura, of national and international renown, started his career in 1982, when he opened his first store in the city of Fortaleza, the capital of the northeaster state of Ceará, in Brazil. He was one of the first Brazilian designers to look at the international market.
In 1989, when he was little over ten years into his career and was already a reference in Brazilian fashion, the native of the state of Pará, then living in Ceará, was invited by the Brazilian foreign office (Itamaraty) to represent Brazil in an international fair in Osaka, Japan, the "World Trade Fashion."
Considered an icon of Brazilian fashion, the designer has items catalogued in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and sells his creations in France, Spain, Portugal and the United States.
The brand, whose main source of income is custom-made clothing, has participated in the São Paulo Fashion Week ever since its first edition, in 1996. With strong presence in the media, Lino Villaventura has photographs of his work in editorials on the national versions of publications such as Vogue, Elle and Marie Claire, and in international publications such as Collezione, L'Officiel Homme, Maglieria Italiana, among others.
The designer is also known for the awards he was granted. He was recently honored with a tribute by the Secretariat of Culture of the State of Ceará for the importance of his body of work to the cultural development of the State.
In Rio de Janeiro, he received four nominations for the prestigious "Rio Sul Fashion Award" in 1997. He was awarded the prize for Best Fashion Show and the Special Jury prize, the most important in the event. Also in 1997, in Rio de Janeiro, he was awarded by the Senai-Cetiqt for his body of work. In 1999, he won the golden needle award at the "3rd Needles of Haute Couture."
Despite the predominantly female crowd, he dresses men too. The creations feature a combination of various materials such as dehydrated fish scales, rubber, goat leather, buriti straw, laces, muslin and taffeta.
He also works as a costume designer. In this area, highlights are the film "Bocage, the Triumph of Love," by Djalma Limongi Batista, and the play "Dorotéia, An Irresponsible Farce in Three Acts," by Nelson Rodrigues, which earned him a nomination for the 1996 Shell Theater Award.
Currently, Lino Villaventura is intensifying sales of his prêt-a-porter in stores in several Brazilian cities: Brasília, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Recife, Florianópolis, Porto Alegre and two of his own stores, in São Paulo and Fortaleza.
Villaventura first exported to the Arab market in 2005, while participating in a showroom at Hotel Crillon, in Paris, during the Fashion Week in the French capital. Ever since, he has maintained as steady clients the North American retail chain Saks Fifth Avenue branch in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, and storeowners in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Syria.
"Orders are closed twice a year. In the beginning, they used to order longer dresses with décolletages only in the back. In the last collection, orders were placed using Brazilian standards for clothing sizes and no adaptations were made," said the designer.
According to Lino, the export volume to the Arab market is still not very large, however it has lots of added value, as most of the clothing is very elaborate. "I have a very good relation with the region and I am enjoying it a lot," he said. According to Lino, Arab women like lots of colors and rarely buy black dresses.
Service
www.linovillaventura.com.br
Anba
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.