In September 2020, Carolina Sarria took the internet by storm when, in quick succession, she was revealed as one of the 100 cover stars of Vogue Italia’s September issue—which highlighted people from all walks of life, from Bella Hadid and Cindy Crawford to an Uber driver based in New York—and later, hosted a fashion show on Animal Crossing, the Nintendo Switch game that became a global sensation in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Born in the city of Cali, in Colombia, Sarria moved to New York in 2000 to study fashion design. She became a fixture in the city’s artistic community, developing an interest in different artistic disciplines over the years, including collage, painting, sculpture, and street art, which extended the nature of her work to go beyond “just” fashion design. As for many, the pandemic represented a turning point for Sarria, a self-described designer and multi-disciplinary artist. “I always liked to do everything, but didn’t know how to put it together,” she says, describing her practice as having “octopus legs.
Her Animal Crossing show was a turning point for Sarria, and she’s since pursued a myriad of innovative presentation models. Her spring 2025 collection, for example, which is now available at Dover Street Market globally, can be discovered through a series of wheatpaste posters she’s designed that come to life with augmented reality once scanned. The animated models wearing Sarria’s clothes were designed and enlivened by herself, too.
Sarria’s show on Animal Crossing
While her work can sometimes blur the lines between online and IRL, in 2016 she opened a boutique and atelier in the Lower East Side, which she says allowed her to approach her design work more expansively by merging it with her studio practice. “I start all of my collections with art, which means the fashion and art components of my work are threaded together every time,” she says. And indeed, there is an air of defiance in Sarria’s art; the street-art influence is utterly New York while also reminiscent of the art found in the streets of her native Cali. In that sense, Sarria’s work is an amalgamation of her lived experiences as they relate to queerness, Latinidad, and her adopted city. The store closed in 2021, but it left an impression on her creative process which influences her still to this day.
Sarria describes her collections as “rebellious and fluid,” evident in the way that each season the look of her collection mutates depending on her current fascination and the art practice that she develops concurrently; but her punkish take on the classics remains her signature. Her spring 2025 lineup, for instance, was inspired by the circus as a “meeting space for outsiders”—Sarria found a vintage circus poster at a flea market in Paris last year, which prompted her exploration of the theme. From there, she produces pieces by “intervening” classic silhouettes with her art. This particular approach has led Sarria to organically transition her collection to be primarily a menswear line that she considers androgynous.
Her namesake label has been available at DSM since 2021, launching with a collection she developed after she was granted a license from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in 2020 to explore Warhol’s art and incorporate it in her designs. Starting fall 2025, her work will also be stocked at Bergdorf Goodman. This summer, Sarria will unveil a site-specific installation and a capsule collection in Montauk, where she is partly based. The designer has also been expanding her sculpting practice with projects in Italy. “I sculpt from what I remember from other worlds,” says the designer, rather poetically, explaining that her sculpting practice examines “the evolution of being.” For Sarria we were never just humans, but shape-shifters who have mutated over time and through each one of our life cycles—something one can easily say about her own work, too.
