Daniela Benaim is a stylist and art director from Caracas, Venezuela, based in London since 2018. Influenced by cinema, magical realism, mythology, and folklore, her work celebrates femininity and Latinidad. She has collaborated with publications such as British Vogue, Vogue Mexico, Vogue Italia, Atmos, and ODDA, as well as with brands like Louis Vuitton, Anciela, By Efraín Mogollón, Puerta Negra, and Nayibe Warchausky.
Her creative partnership with photographer Silvana Trevale is one of friendship, magic, and synchronicity. As true comadres (both immigrants in London), they have developed projects that blend fashion, poetry, and documentation. In their work, wardrobe becomes a symbolic language to tell stories, explore identity, and evoke memory.
Their most recent short film, Unveiling Beauty in Chuao, celebrates the women who lead cacao production in the coastal Venezuelan village of Chuao. Commissioned by the PhotoVogue Festival and Puig, the project honors a community where tradition, craft, and feminine strength are deeply rooted in the land. In collaboration with Tibisay Planchez Ladera—a local seamstress and self-taught artist who creates Carnival costumes from recycled and organic materials—they designed garments inspired by the “cacao queens,” symbols of resistance, creativity, and beauty.
In this context, Carnival becomes a metaphor for collective transformation. The costumes—made from cacao leaves, soda caps, and food wrappers—reframe scarcity and reuse as acts of pride and power. Ritual songs dedicated to cacao, sung by the women during harvest, thread through the film like an ancestral prayer, reaffirming the spiritual dimension of their craft.
For Benaim and Trevale, this film is both a love letter to the women of Venezuela and a declaration of fashion’s power as a narrative vehicle.
