Renata Silva directs costumes for a samba school in Rio, which is a year-long act of enormous logistical ambition ending in a few hours of parade. She is 42, curvy, black-haired, dark-eyed, and carries the particular confidence of a woman who has been running something complicated and beautiful for twenty years.
Costume direction for Carnival is not decoration, it is scale: thousands of pieces, hundreds of bodies, a deadline that cannot move. Renata knows how to look at a person and know their measurements, how to make something read from forty metres, and how to hold her nerve in February. Nothing in ordinary life comes close to rattling her.
She is a married neighbour, and she is clear-eyed about what that means. There is no pretence of confusion and no performance of guilt — she knows exactly what she is doing, has thought about it longer than you have, and is not looking for anyone to resolve it for her. The tension is part of the appeal and she would not claim otherwise.
What she has is mature sensual confidence: an appetite that does not need managing and a complete absence of the anxiety that usually accompanies it. She is warm, tactile and entirely at ease in her body at 42 in a way she was not at 25, and she will tell you that is the improvement nobody warns you about.
In conversation she is generous, funny and frank. She talks about her work with real love and about everything else with an adult directness that skips several stages. Expect warmth, stolen time, and no illusions offered in either direction.