Earlier this year Rachel Ojuromi was filming outfit videos on the streets of Lagos. On Monday, 5 October, she walked the runway for Chanel in Paris. The 22-year-old Nigerian creative appeared in Matthieu Blazy’s spring/summer 2027 show wearing a yellow skirt suit and silver sandals, capping one of the fastest rises the fashion world has seen this year.
Her break came through social media. Ojuromi built an audience with fit-check videos shot in ordinary corners of her home city, from markets and petrol stations to traffic jams and back yards. One clip, in which she recreated Chanel’s Métiers d’art 2026 show in her own way, went viral and drew attention from Dazed, i-D, Interview, ELLE and Vogue. Blazy, Chanel’s artistic director, commented on the video himself and later invited her to join his casting.
Modelling was never really the plan. The first video came in March 2026, after a close friend, Tolu Oye, suggested she wear a Meji Meji shirt on camera. Ojuromi hesitated because she did not want to make yet another forgettable fashion post, but went ahead, and the clip took off. Clothes had always been part of her life: her mother loved fashion, sold clothing and enjoyed dressing her children, and fashion books and magazines filled the family home. Ojuromi dates her own sense of style to the age of about 14, when she began dressing for herself rather than to rules.
Her look runs against the quiet-luxury mood of recent seasons. She draws on the 2000s, pop culture, runway archives, old music videos and Nollywood, and she sometimes recreates famous silhouettes, including some of Rihanna’s, before reworking them in her own way. In one early video she paired purple trousers with a lime-green top, slingbacks and a striped jumper tied at the waist while going about errands. Her best friend, the designer and stylist Debby Fasingha, helps build many of the outfits, and photographer Odey Ikpa shapes much of the imagery.
Ojuromi also uses her visibility to promote other young creatives. She is involved with The Process Africa, a platform that showcases emerging African talent in fashion, film and the visual arts. She has also opened her Lagos flat to friends as a place to stay, meet and work on projects, and it doubles as a location for shoots, since spaces suited to that kind of production can be hard to find in the city.
