L’Oréal Paris Takes Over the Champs-Élysées for a History-Making Runway Show

by Eliza Grossman October 2, 2017

On a grey Parisian day, crowds flooded the Champs-Élysées for what would be a fashion first. Beauty giant L’Oréal Paris had taken over the iconic shopping promenade for a one-of-a-kind fashion show with some of the biggest industry names in the business. Backstage buzzed as top model after top model strolled in for another day at the office, which, in the end, would be unlike any runway before. We talked to models, Liya Kebede and Bianca Balti before the show and both expressed nerves similar to their first show ever. This particular show required they walk down an extremely long runway, in front of a 600-person seated crowd and thousands of public spectators. In the thick of Paris Fashion Week, this proved to be a daunting task, even for the most seasoned of models. Famous faces like Doutzen Kroes, Soo Joo Park, Helen Mirren and Jane Fonda all walked the runway in high fashion looks from designers like Off-White and Balmain, paired with over 70 hair and makeup looks from L’Oréal Paris’s global make-up director Val Garland and L’Oréal Paris hair artists Stéphane Lancien. Both cast and crowd went crazy for the age-defiant Jane Fonda as she closed the show in a skin tight Balmain gown from the Fall/Winter 2017 collection.