Streetwear Designer Profile: Caroline Bentley Noble of V2Bentley
Pretty much any designer would agree that once Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Migos and Kylie Jenner have worn your creations, you’ve basically made it. Cue Caroline Bentley Noble. Despite the fact that she has no formal fashion training, the brains behind streetwear label V2Bentley counts all of those celebrities and more as fans of her brand—and she’s only 26 years old. “Dressing was always a way for me to express myself but it wasn’t something I’d ever considered for a career—it wasn’t my plan at all,” Caroline tells Teen Vogue. “The way my brand took off and developed, it was completely unexpected. It’s crazy to think back on it!”
Growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, Caroline’s personal style was somewhat stunted because of the sartorial status quo. “I was a little scared to be different because everyone wore polos and khakis and Wallabees,” she reveals. “Everyone had a standard uniform and to dress outside of that was frowned upon—or I was scared that it would be.” Caroline therefore resorted to hoarding vintage pieces she’d buy in secret—oversized t-shirts and retro windbreakers—in her closet. It wasn’t until she moved to college that they began to get regular wear. Soon, they constituted her daily style.
“I graduated early and moved to Brooklyn to attend acting school,” says Caroline. “I think my real period of self exploration started when I moved to New York. Living in Brooklyn, you have the freedom to wear whatever you want and no one cares. It was totally liberating for me.” Upon graduation, Caroline moved to Los Angeles, thinking it was the logical next step for her aspiring career in entertainment. Shortly after, however, she realized that her dreams of becoming an actress were no longer what drove her. “I didn’t go after acting as hard as I should have for whatever reason— I think you can discover other paths as you get to grow a little bit, especially straight after school,” she explains. As luck would have it, in 2013 she scored an opportunity to help style a PacSun shoot for Kendall and Kylie Jenners' new collection with the brand. “I was like, ‘You know what? I should just rip up some shirts and make a rack that’s really cool and comfortable.’ I did, and they ended up pulling everything from the rack,” remembers Caroline.
From there, her trajectory as a designer skyrocketed; PacSun reached out and asked if she could produce a large batch of shirts for them to sell soon after the shoot, prompting her to realize she had the makings of a legitimate business on her hands. “I instantly put up a website and decided to try and make it selling these types of clothes,” she reveals. “It was not at all what I had planned going in.”
The Kendall and Kylie styling job secured the entire Kardashian-Jenner family as V2Bentley fans—Kylie, Khloe and Kourtney soon began championing the brand. Thanks to the tight circle of Hollywood stylists who often work with many different high-profile celebrities, news of Caroline and her creations spread quickly by word of mouth. “I have to give the stylists so much credit. They’re doing their research and are really helping budding designers by finding them on Instagram and through PR teams,” she says. “For me, my growth was also thanks to personal relationships—I had to be fearless in terms of forming them and just walking up to people and being like, Hey, this is what I’m doing. They worst that could happen is someone just says no.”
Just as V2Bentley's name was broadening, its clothing, too, was beginning to reach new experimental heights. Despite the fact that Caroline had no formal fashion design experience (she learned basic sewing skills from her grandma when she was younger), she went from selling ripped up and bleached vintage tees to offering patched up jackets, hand painted leather pieces and more intricate one-of-a-kind requests. “I just started having so many ideas all of the time. Google is a great tool, you can find a tutorial on how to do anything,” she laughs.
A sole one-of-a-kind request would come to stand above all others. In what Caroline describes as her most exciting celebrity client moment, Rihanna wore a custom bedazzled V2Bentley mask to accessorize a fire denim-on-denim outfit she wore to Coachella. “I had a booth at Coachella in 2017 where I was selling vintage t-shirts and some face masks I had started making while sitting in the booth,” says Caroline. “A stylist I had worked with saw me there and was like, ‘Oh my god, can I get one of those masks?’ So I dropped off a bunch of stuff for her and Rihanna ended up wearing the mask. It was crazy.”
After that, Caroline was tapped to lend her painting skills to a Lanotta Studio fringe blazer, which would ultimately be worn by Lady Gaga on her Joanne World Tour. She painted song titles including “Perfect Illusion” and album names like The Fame all over the jacket, rendering it a knockout on-stage statement piece.
Now, Caroline is continuing to prove herself as an artistic force to be reckoned with. Inspired by designers with the likes of Virgil Abloh and Jerry Lorenzo, she’s lasering in on her brand’s point of view, which cleverly twists her southern roots into cutting-edge silhouettes. “I always think about what brands I liked growing something I’ve never seen before?” she says. “My style is still really Kentucky, to be honest. I still love the really country fashion that I grew up seeing a lot of.”
Caroline plans on dropping an entire collection of original pieces soon—each piece will be available to the masses, meaning you won’t have to worry about scrambling after a one-of-a-kind item that catches your eye. As for her advice to young design hopefuls? “My main driving force this entire time has just been the idea of do it yourself,” she reveals. “You can think about things as much as you want but if you don’t do them then they don’t exist.”
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