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Just a year ago, neighbors in the Ciudadela neighborhood in the coastal town of Tumaco, Colombia, knew Valentina Castro Rojas as a girl with a talent for braiding Afro hair.
Apart from that, her height of 1.75 meters and 75 centimeters had attracted attention in some fashion shows and beauty pageants at her school and in her neighborhood.
But no one had imagined that, at just 18 years old, Valentina would be parading for the world's best-selling luxury brand.
Louis Vuitton is a brand that is well-known but remote for the vast majority of Tumaqueños. The only store of this brand in Colombia is in Bogota, more than a thousand kilometers from Valentina's home. Its products are accessible to a tiny minority.
Before her life changed thanks to an Instagram message from a Dominican model agency talent scout, Valentina charged between US$4 and US$12 for hairstyles in her neighborhood. She did them at her home and at home.
Now she parades wearing multi-thousand dollar outfits in such iconic locations as the Musée d'Orsay in Paris or the Italian island of Isola Bella on Lake Maggiore.
"One of the things I admire most about other models and also about myself is making it look easy, because it's not. It might be very cold, it might be very hot, your feet might hurt, but you go out like it's nothing," Valentina tells BBC Mundo now from the perspective of an international model.
After several months traveling around Europe, she returned to Tumaco and is in her last year of high school in a school near her home while studying English virtually.
She lives with her mother, who sells products by catalog, and her sisters. Her father is a fisherman.
Her life before modeling
Tumaco, where Valentina was born and raised, is a small city on Colombia's Pacific coast near the border with Ecuador. It has a little more than 250,000 inhabitants. Four out of five 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 latest census, more than half of the inhabitants of Tumaco live below the multidimensional poverty line. Three out of ten have their basic needs unsatisfied.
Valentina, however,...