I’ll admit my first reaction was a small “oh, nice.” My second was to look at the dates and do the math.
Élodie Gossuin, Miss France 2001, is 45. She has four kids, two sets of twins, a radio and TV schedule that would exhaust most people, and she turned up at Paris Fashion Week to walk for designer Julien Paoletti. She wasn’t a background name on a long list of models. She was billed as a guest of honour, and by most accounts she lit up the room with that wide, unmistakable smile.
Twenty-Five Years Later
There’s a nice symmetry here. Back in 2001, just after winning her crown, she walked in a Carven show. A quarter of a century on, she’s on another Paris runway. Same city, same ease. The difference is that this time she brings two decades of television, a marriage, and a houseful of children with her.
Plenty of former pageant winners fade from view. Gossuin didn’t. She moved into presenting, did a stint in regional politics, co-hosted Junior Eurovision in 2021, and never really left the French public’s living rooms.
The Part Behind the Photos
What I find more interesting than the runway is her real life. She married Bertrand Lacherie in 2006, and they have Jules and Rose (born 2007) and Joséphine and Léonard (born 2013). This summer the eldest pair left home for university, about an hour away, which she seems to be handling with a mix of pride and the usual parental wobble. The couple also just marked twenty years of marriage, and Bertrand proposed again, reportedly dressed as a unicorn. Her caption said it all: twenty years, four kids, and she’d said yes again.
She also doesn’t pretend it has been effortless. In an interview this spring, she spoke about Rose turning 18 and admitted she’d missed a lot over the years while juggling impossible work hours. I think that’s why people root for her. She doesn’t sell a flawless life. She just keeps showing up.
So What’s the Big Deal?
Honestly, maybe it isn’t one. That might be the point. A woman in her mid-forties walks a fashion show, and the only really surprising thing is that we still find it surprising.
Fashion has long had a habit of treating thirty as a cliff. Seeing someone like Gossuin back on a runway, comfortable and clearly enjoying herself, nudges that assumption a little. She isn’t doing it to prove anything. She seems to be doing it because it looked fun, and that’s a better reason than most.