Rachel Ojuromi had been in Paris for a week when one of her oldest manifestations started to become real life. “I’ve always wanted to come to Paris,” the 22-year-old says. Back in 2020, she would post videos imagining herself one day living there, cats and all. “And now, I’m like, ‘Hello? I’m actually in Paris?!’”

She has rightly been making the most of it. By her second night in the city, Ojuromi had gathered her friends for a 3 a.m. pilgrimage to the Eiffel Tower, calling others back home in Nigeria to share the moment. And she’s been back again. “I really, really love looking at the Eiffel Tower,” she says, laughing. There have been chicken and fries (“the French fries are actually good”), long conversations with friends, and matcha runs. But nothing quite compares to what came next. Last night, Rachel Ojuromi made her runway debut at Chanel.

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Long before Ojuromi was walking beneath the glass roof of the Grand Palais, she was making Lagos her own runway. Working closely with her best friend, stylist and designer Debby Fasingha, Ojuromi began attracting attention online with exuberant fit-check videos that placed her model walk and vibrant, reference-heavy looks against the legacy of maximalist Nollywood and the everyday bustle of her hometown. Viral clips see her stride and strut through Lagos in fuchsia fringed skirts and animal print co-ords, louche tailored suits and luxurious layering, and corseted gowns, all to buy vegetables from a market, pick up the newspaper, and balance a basket of bananas on her head. There’s joyous colour combos, textural delights, and plenty of aesthetic-hopping. It’s a conceit that hits because it’s simple but magnetic: if the fashion world wasn’t immediately available to her, she could build one around herself. (That’s something Ojuromi has continued to uplift too with her own culture platform The Process Africa.)

Lagos remains fundamental to the way Ojuromi sees herself. Born and raised in Nigeria, she has spoken about the city as something embedded in everything she makes; even as those street-side walks began travelling far beyond it, they remained unmistakably rooted there. In Paris, that instinct suddenly found itself transported onto fashion’s most rarefied stage.

And Ojuromi’s relationship with Chanel had already taken on a strangely prophetic quality. While she had been referencing Chanel collections past for some time, it was her viral recreation of the Métiers d’Art show that propelled her here. “That video was a vehicle that led us to where we are now,” she says. Still, she is wary of framing any of it as an overnight success. “It’s a series of compounding events. It’s never overnight. It’s all your life you work towards something.”

Ojuromi describes herself as someone who has always been stubborn about seeing an idea through. Once she decides something, she feels compelled to make it real, even, she jokes, when that decision is as simple as cutting her hair. “Every time I ever had an idea, I always made sure to see it through,” she says. “Having an idea and executing, believing in your dreams, and believing in yourself” is, to her mind, how she ended up here.

The confirmation itself arrived amid an otherwise pretty normal day. Ojuromi was sitting at home in a robe: “I love robes. I’m always wearing robes”, when her team called with the news. Her initial reaction was almost comically calm: “Oh, of course.” The enormity of it only landed later, during the first lineup. “I started crying because I was like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait… what’s going on?’”

Making her runway debut under the tenure of Matthieu Blazy is also poignant. Ojuromi remembers listening to a podcast about Gabrielle Chanel while walking down the street last year and becoming fascinated by a woman who, in her telling, lived fully and pursued what she wanted despite being told otherwise. Blazy’s work had resonated with her long before Chanel entered the picture. She recalls seeing his leather ready-to-wear at Bottega Veneta and being struck by his understanding of “the impact of simplicity.” When she heard he was moving to Chanel, she remembers thinking: “Wow, my two worlds are colliding.”

Chanel spring/summer 2027.

Photo: Isidore Montag / Gorunway.com

Ojuromi wore a grey and yellow tweed shirt and midi skirt, even more poignant as the sunshine shade is Debby’s favourite colour. “When I saw my look, I was like, ‘It’s a sign. This is a sign,’” she says. The textured tweed felt instinctively right to Ojuromi, who saw her look as a youthful interpretation of one of the house’s most recognisable codes. Her beauty look, with gleaming skin and braids pulled back neatly, was similarly unfussy. “They wanted me to look exactly like me and I really appreciate that,” she says. “I look so pretty. I feel really pretty.”

The night before the show was spent at a refit, getting her hair done, and then decompressing with friends over drinks before, inevitably, running back to the Eiffel Tower. The following morning began with matcha and, crucially, a proper night’s sleep. “No way, I have to sleep,” she remembers thinking. “I have to be well rested, ready to go.”

She practised her walk, too. For someone whose energetic stomp through Lagos helped introduce her to much of the internet, nerves still arrived when the Chanel runway beckoned. “I wanted to make sure that nothing goes wrong. I don’t stumble on my feet.” More experienced models, including Bhavitha Mandava and Anok Yai, helped settle them, reminding Ojuromi to stay calm, let loose and, most importantly, remember that she deserved to be there. By the time she stepped onto the runway, the advice had sunk in. “I was having fun,” she says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I deserve to be here, of course!’”

Backstage, the emotions caught up with her again. When Ojuromi started crying, the people around her closed ranks, reassuring her and helping her pull herself together before she walked. “You got this girl, don’t stress,” she remembers being told. She had a quick glam defo. “Of course it didn’t look like I was crying because, diva,” she jokes.

And inevitably, her thoughts return to Lagos. Ojuromi remembers sitting on her couch there, watching a Chanel show, and wondering whether she and her friends could create one of their own. And so they did, and so now, she’s walked in the real thing.

Her message home? “You can dream, you can believe in something, and it can just work out,” she says. “You can dream yourself into a life that is possible even if nobody else gets it.” From Lagos to the Grand Palais, Ojuromi is fairly compelling proof of the concept. Follow along as she takes behind the scenes of her turn at Chanel spring/summer 2027 below.