Wohivia Interview (2024)

Working with Olivia (@wohiviacreates) is a dream. She's infectiously passionate and deeply enthusiastic about fashion, expression and, I think most impactfully, people. 

Starting out as a designer, Olivia went on to showcase her work at London Fashion Week 2023. The one-of-a-kind pieces proved popular, adorned with crystals and precious stones sourced from Brazil. However, running a small business often finds you spread too thin. Designing, planning, directing, admin - it a lot! As the popularity of her brand grew, Olivia found herself thinking, “I can’t see myself doing this forever.”

This revelation pushed her into pursuing creative direction and styling work, and she hasn't looked back since.

Olivia has a strong creative voice, it’s rare I don't stumble across a Wohivia post without knowing exactly who it belongs to. I always wondered where her style came from, and how closely she aligned with trends. Her early work leant heavily into spirituality, with the frequent use of crystals and their deliberate placement aligning with chakras and spiritual zones. The garments themselves had a heavy Y2K influence. Each piece is a meeting of trends and personal indulgence.

As with most stylists, she was her first test subject. Telling us that she first started experimenting with her style around age 12 and noting bowler hats and braces as her wardrobe staples. Her approach is conversational, she creates work that elicits a response. She wants to include us in the work, to share in her enthusiasm.

“I just enjoy it, I love working with people. […] With designing you just lock yourself in a room and get stuff done but I’ve found I’ve met so many more people going this route and that’s what I’ve enjoyed.”

When your concepts are so inspired by people and popular culture, you need to be around people. You need to see their response to your ideas to see how they can develop, and if it even has legs in the first place. The contrast and combination of everyone's ideas enrich a concept tenfold and add dimensions you may never have considered independently. 

Olivia tells us about getting live feedback from her collaborators but also how the biggest testament to her work is a comfortable model. A model that not only eases into the environment Olivia has created but thrives in it.

“I love to bring people out of their shell. My one thing is, I love pushing people to the max.”

Embarrassment can be the death of a shoot if not handled well. Especially for someone like Olivia, whose shoots lean heavily into brashness and big personality. This is rooted in her relationship with her mental health. I asked if she felt a responsibility to her team to show up confident and reassuring.

“I leave it all at home! My work has a lot to do with mental health, my work digs me out of holes sometimes. I’ll be feeling crap but I wake up on a shoot day and think yes this is what I want to be doing. When I do these projects I’m just in it fully and I forget whatever’s going on.”

We both expressed a mutual love for existing out of context. Turning up to a shoot and just being the person that makes things pretty. Nothing matters for a few hours besides making people look and feel beautiful.

And it hasn’t fallen on deaf ears (or blind eyes, I guess). Olivia told us that she was collecting reviews for her website recently, some of which brought her to tears.

“There was so much nice stuff from models and even photographers saying they can just sit back and do their job knowing things are in good hands. I love working in teams and I feel like Wohivia has become a bit of a platform for people to connect through. […] I’m not gatekeeping anything, you come here for TFP (Trade For Print), and you take whatever you want away from this. Whether it’s a new model, a new idea, a new location - I want to share everything.”

The audience is so important to Olivia’s work. It’s for them, but also by them. She often uses her platform to seek new collaborators and give opportunities to her peers to network, gain experience and produce content. Everyone plays their part, everyone is valued. Having such a community-oriented approach also allows you to see so many different perspectives and enrich the experiences of newcomers into the creative scene, which for many of us who have struggled with the competitive, dog-eat-dog dynamic, is hugely valuable.

In this vein, she tells us how important it is for her to champion diversity and encourage people to take up space in situations that haven’t always tried to include them. It’s a credit and her testament to her talent as a director and a curator that this choice feels natural and effortless, showing how easy it is to be inclusive despite the resistance from a lot of bigger casting agencies and productions.

“When I was doing runway I was used to working with size 6/8 straight-sized women and I wanted to push that with my shoots.”

Olivia has worn many hats in her time in the fashion industry, from her experiences as a designer at LFW to her stint in buying and merchandising, she credits the broad scope of experiences as vital in teaching her so many of the skills she applies now as a stylist and director, telling us “I feel like I’ve found something I’m gonna do for a long time!”

She’s a lover girl, and I love that for her. She’s been working her arse off for free because she loves and values everything that art and fashion provide for people. A lot of people lose sight of their creativity when it stops being profitable, however, it’ll always be profitable for Olivia, because it’ll always bring her joy. It’ll always resonate and always inspire. It’ll always bring people together and give them a common goal.

“[I'm inspired by] everything, anything I see. […] I want a platform that invites people to connect with other people. You don’t have to be a model to model, you can be art whoever you are.”