From Lagos Streets to Chanel Runway: How Rachael Ojuromi Turned a Viral Moment Into a Paris Debut

At 22, Rachael Ojuromi is more than a rising Nigerian model. A Lagos-born creative with a background in film, writing and communication, she has built a distinctive identity around fashion, visual storytelling and the energy of everyday Lagos, while also founding The Process Africa, a platform created to spotlight emerging African talent.

Her social media presence has grown through colourful, highly stylised videos in which she turns markets, traffic, neighbourhood streets and other ordinary Lagos settings into unexpected fashion runways. Before international modelling agencies and Paris Fashion Week entered the picture, Ojuromi was already using creativity to construct a world around herself, blending fashion with storytelling and presenting Lagos not as a backdrop to overcome but as a place capable of producing its own visual language.

That creative approach reached a new level on October 5, 2026, when Ojuromi made her official runway debut for Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2027 show at the Grand Palais in Paris, under creative director Matthieu Blazy.

The moment was particularly striking because Ojuromi had previously encountered Chanel not from inside the fashion house but from Lagos, where she and her close friend, stylist and designer Debby Fasingha, recreated looks from Chanel’s Métiers d’Art collection using second-hand pieces sourced locally.

The project became a viral sensation and eventually caught Blazy’s attention, turning what began as a Lagos creative experiment into a pathway to one of fashion’s most recognisable runways.

From a Lagos Recreation to the Grand Palais

The turning point came when Ojuromi and Fasingha reinterpreted Chanel looks across Lagos, including at the Red Line rail overpass in Yaba, using thrifted and second-hand clothing while bringing their own styling and storytelling to the references.

Their videos did not simply reproduce the clothes; they placed high-fashion ideas inside familiar Nigerian environments, with Ojuromi walking through the city with the confidence of a runway model. The work eventually reached Matthieu Blazy, who responded to one of their Instagram posts with the single word “Everything”, a moment that helped propel Ojuromi's work to a much wider international audience.

Ojuromi’s rise since then has been remarkably quick, with representation extending across major fashion markets including New York, Paris and London, but the Chanel appearance represents something more personal than a viral breakthrough. She had long admired Blazy’s approach to fashion and described herself as connecting strongly with the simplicity and storytelling in his presentations.

Now, the same creative who once recreated Chanel looks with her friend on the streets of Lagos has walked the actual Chanel runway in Paris, making her debut in a collection titled “La Conversation — Part Three — Different Faces of the Same Coin.” For Ojuromi, the journey is a striking example of how a local creative vision, executed with persistence and imagination, can travel far beyond the place where it began.