PATBO: MEET THE BRAND THAT DRESSED BEYONCÉ

Under the lights of Vancouver's BC Place, on September 11, 2023, Beyoncé walked onstage for the Renaissance World Tour wearing a hand-embroidered, crystal-and-fringe bodysuit that had taken 60 days to make. It had been built to a mood board from her longtime stylist, Shiona Turini, roughly three months earlier — not in a Paris atelier or a Milan workroom, but in Uberlândia, a city in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais that most of the global fashion industry couldn't place on a map, sewn and embroidered by hand by the team of Brazilian artisans behind the label PatBO.

The label on the inside said PatBO. Its founder and creative director, Patrícia Bonaldi, later put it simply: "With Beyoncé, there was no end. She took the brand to another level." These days, she says, people recognize her as "the stylist who dressed Beyoncé" before they know anything else about her — including the part where she's built one of the very few Brazilian fashion brands with genuine, verifiable global retail scale, on the back of hand embroidery she didn't stitch alone.

That's the story worth sitting with here: not just the celebrity name-drop, but what it unlocked.

THE DESIGNER, NOT THE SEAMSTRESS

Bonaldi's fashion instincts started at home — her mother took her along on trips to fabric shops and had clothes custom-made for her as a child. She launched her own eponymous couture label in 2003, then founded PatBO in 2012 as its younger, more wearable sibling: ready-to-wear, resortwear and eveningwear built around the hand embroidery, beading and crystal work that remain the brand's signature. In 2014 she consolidated her holdings into Nohda Group, which also includes the brand Apartamento 03.

Worth being precise about here: Bonaldi is the designer and creative director who conceives PatBO's pieces — she isn't the one sitting at the embroidery frame. That work belongs to a workshop of Brazilian artisans, many of them trained through a free embroidery school she founded in Uberlândia in 2015. It's a genuinely deep bench: PatBO now produces out of its own Uberlândia factory and a São Paulo atelier. The embroidery on a bodysuit built for one of the most photographed women alive was made by artisans trained in a school its own designer built, in the interior of Minas Gerais, nowhere near a beach — and that's not incidental branding, it's structural to how PatBO makes anything at all.

PatBO's international break, by most accounts, came almost by accident: a Harrods buyer discovered the brand at a Brazilian trade show and started placing wholesale orders. That single order is, in a roundabout way, how a hand-embroidered bodysuit ends up in Vancouver two decades later.

BEYOND BEYONCÉ: THE FULL BLACK BOOK

Beyoncé wore PatBO twice within three months of that Vancouver performance — a denim ensemble, hand-beaded and valued at roughly R$17,000, when she arrived in Salvador, Bahia in December 2023 for the Renaissance film premiere. But she's far from the only name on PatBO's client list.

Jennifer Lopez has worn PatBO pieces for campaign shoots. Alicia Keys, Camila Cabello (who wore the brand to the 2023 Grammy Awards, and again for her 2019 VMA performance), Halsey, Issa Rae, Olivia Palermo, Tate McRae and Paris Hilton have all been photographed in it. Supermodel Alessandra Ambrosio has gone further than borrowing a look — she fronted a PatBO capsule collection and walked the brand's New York Fashion Week show. The label even made it onto the streaming radar via a cameo in Emily in Paris.

It's a genuinely global, genre-spanning client list — pop, R&B, film, modeling — which is worth noting for an audience used to hearing "Brazilian fashion" reduced to a single aesthetic or a single occasion. PatBO's version of Brazilian fashion is being chosen for a stadium tour, a red carpet, and a magazine campaign, not just a beach.

THE ONLY BRAZILIAN NAME ON THE NYFW CALENDAR

PatBO made its official New York Fashion Week debut in September 2021 — and has held a rare distinction ever since: it is, by the account of both Brazilian and international press, the only Brazilian brand on NYFW's official calendar, shown under the CFDA umbrella alongside the American establishment.

Its most recent showing, on September 16, 2025, presented the Summer 2026 collection under the title "Alma Latina" (Latin Soul) — a collection Bonaldi described as "the least commercial and most inspirational" PatBO has made, drawing on Carmen Miranda, Elza Soares, Frida Kahlo and Selena Quintanilla, and introducing a new lotus-flower motif alongside the brand's first standalone shoe line. It's a meaningful evolution: a brand once known primarily for eveningwear and resort pieces is now explicitly building toward accessories and footwear as full categories, not add-ons.

HOW BIG IS PATBO, REALLY

Numbers are where a lot of "global Brazilian brand" claims quietly fall apart. PatBO's hold up.

As of the most recent trade-press reporting, the brand operates 15 stores in Brazil and two in the United States — a boutique in Manhattan's Flatiron district and one in Miami's Design District — plus standalone seasonal boutiques in Portofino, Italy and Ramatuelle, France (on Pampelonne beach, near Saint-Tropez). Altogether, PatBO is carried at more than 150 points of sale across 20-plus countries, with roughly 50 stockists in Italy alone; Brazilian press coverage has cited even higher figures — upwards of 25 countries and 250-plus points of sale — reflecting how fast that count keeps moving. About a third of PatBO's revenue now comes from international markets, with the United States its single biggest market outside Brazil. Retail prices run from roughly $350 to $3,000, averaging around $700 — solidly contemporary-luxury territory. The company employs around 600 people globally and, notably for an independent, founder-led label, is profitable.

The brand's momentum also shows in its leadership bench: in 2025, Isabella Baboury was named President of PatBO, succeeding Cara Chen after an eight-year run — the kind of executive hire that signals a brand scaling past its founder-and-a-small-team era. PatBO has publicly stated ambitions to grow to 10–12 U.S. stores within five years, with Los Angeles, Dallas and Austin named as likely next stops.

HOW TO SHOP IT — WHEREVER YOU ARE

For readers outside Brazil, the practical question is simple: can you actually buy this?

Direct from the brand, patbo.com ships internationally on a delivery-duty-paid basis — meaning taxes and duties are calculated and included at checkout rather than sprung on you at your door — with orders typically arriving within about 15 business days depending on customs, though the brand doesn't publish a full list of eligible countries, so it's worth checking at checkout or via its customer service before ordering to a specific address.

The more reliable route for most international shoppers, UK-based readers included, is through the major multi-brand retailers that already carry PatBO and have established global shipping: Net-a-Porter, Mytheresa, Fwrd and Revolve online, alongside Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus in the U.S., and Farfetch and Ounass in the Gulf. For anyone travelling, there are standalone boutiques to visit in New York (Flatiron) and Miami (Design District) year-round, and seasonal outposts in Portofino and on the French Riviera in summer — plus 15 stores across Brazil for anyone making the trip to the source.

THE NUMBERS DO THE ARGUING

PatBO isn't a Rio brand — it's from Uberlândia, deep in Minas Gerais, nowhere near a postcard beach. It isn't selling an "exotic" costume — it's selling hand embroidery precise enough to dress one of the most scrutinized performers on the planet, made by a workshop of artisans trained at a school its own founder built to keep those techniques alive. And it isn't a niche curiosity — it's a profitable, 600-person, 20-plus-country operation with a president poached from the wider luxury industry and a shoe line launching off the back of a runway show most of that same industry had to watch from a seat, because there's only one Brazilian name on the list that gets you in the room.

That distinction — one Brazilian name on a calendar of hundreds — is worth sitting with the next time "Brazilian fashion" gets used as shorthand for something smaller than an industry.

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