Quinta Brunson flaunted different fashion looks during awards show season, but says before meeting stylist Bryon Javar it wasn’t easy to find someone who understood her or was willing to dress her frame.

“Not only am I 4-foot-11, [but] I’m 4-foot-11 with breasts and a butt. And that’s just the cardinal sin: to be short and have the nerve to have any type of curve,” she tells InStyle. “Before working with Bryon, there were times where I would work with other stylists and I just have to be like, ‘I’m not this young,’ or ‘this feels too young for me.’ And it would be like, ‘No, you can pull it off.’ And I was like, ‘But it’s not about pulling it off. It’s about what I want to represent when I come to certain award shows or certain events I have to do.'”

“I want to make sure I can convey who I am through what I wear,” the star continued, adding fashion is a way for her to show who she is without talking.

Quinta learned to love her body thanks to her experience as a trained dancer. As a woman with curves, she thought it’d be fitting to include some others in her show Abbott Elementary.

“This is a mockumentary, I feel they do better when you have people who look more familiar,” she says. “I wanted to portray people who looked real. And that inherently comes with, in my opinion, women who have curves.”

Though she knows she may upset people, she embraces Beyoncé‘s “I was born free” lyric in “Church Girl,” noting, “This is starting to really be my ministry. I was born free. I can do what I want.”

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