PARIS — Olympic skiing champion Lindsey Vonn and actress Mika Abdalla shared the runway and the backstage spotlight at L’Oréal Paris’s Le Défilé on Monday, September 28, as the brand opened Paris Fashion Week beneath the Eiffel Tower.
The ninth edition of the show was held at Place Joffre under the theme “Express Your Worth.” The public runway mixed film, fashion, and sport, and was livestreamed on Instagram, TikTok, and L’Oréal Paris’s own platforms. Kendall Jenner opened the evening. The cast also included Heidi Klum, Jane Fonda, Viola Davis, Eva Longoria, Cara Delevingne, Andie MacDowell, Kristen Bell, and Aishwarya Rai. Céline Dion closed the show.
For Abdalla, the night was a Paris Fashion Week debut. The Off Campus star, who plays Allie Hayes in the Prime Video series, walked in an ivory satin gown with a fresh, luminous finish that beauty editors described as polished rather than overdone. Makeup artist Allan Avendaño built the look around skin luminosity; hair stylist Dimitris Giannetos finished the set. L’Oréal Paris USA later posted runway footage with the caption “Mika is the moment.”
Vonn offered a different reading of the same brief: athletic confidence in French-girl glamour. The Olympic alpine champion, still associated in coverage with the serious crash she suffered at the most recent Winter Games, walked the same open-air catwalk. Her makeup, also by Avendaño, used a medium glow, warm bronze, and softly defined neutral lips. Giannetos handled the hair. French and international reports placed her among the night’s notable athletes, alongside figures such as Marie-José Pérec and Paralympian Bebe Vio.
The pairing that traveled fastest online was not only the runway. Backstage images shared from the show, including frames circulated via L’Oréal Paris and Vonn’s own Instagram Stories, showed Abdalla and Vonn together, with actress Ana Qamata also in the frame. Fans of both the skier and the Off Campus cast treated the photos as the crossover of the night: a veteran Olympian and a rising screen actress under the same brand banner.
L’Oréal Paris has long used Le Défilé to put different generations and careers on one stage. This year that range ran from Fonda, walking with her silver hair, to newer faces such as Abdalla, with Vonn sitting in between as proof that the runway is no longer reserved for models alone. Brand messaging for the evening leaned on confidence, individuality, and sisterhood. The setting did the rest. Place Joffre, the lit Eiffel Tower, and a public crowd turned a beauty show into one of the first widely shared images of Paris Fashion Week, which runs through October 6.
For Vonn, the appearance adds another public chapter to a year already defined by recovery and visibility. For Abdalla, it marks a clear step from series breakout to fashion-week debut. Together, the photos did what the show was built to do: put two very different kinds of presence on the same Paris night, and let the audience decide which look stayed with them.
