Long before she gave birth to the omnipresent supermodel sisters Bella and Gigi Hadid, Yolanda Hadid was a model in her own right. By no means has she given up on Fashion Week, but these days, the 56-year-old prefers the front row—the better to get the proud momager content she posts seemingly constantly to her Instagram. Though this Fashion Month hasn’t quite reached its end, it appears that Yolanda is already satisfied with her harvest this season: On Thursday, during Paris Fashion Week, she abandoned her position on the sidelines to join her daughters on the runway at Off-White.
Never one to scale back, Off-White figurehead Virgil Abloh also cast supers like Carolyn Murphy and Mariacarla Boscono. As usual, though, it was the Hadids who stole the show, which started with Bella and ended with Gigi. Yolanda fell somewhere in between, just before Karlie Kloss. In contrast to her daughters’ giant tulle dresses, Yolanda wore black trousers, cat eye sunglasses, and a graffitied blazer with an off-white bra to match. Ostensibly in keeping with the show’s mechanic theme, she also wore a silver and gold pair of earrings that resembled Allen wrenches. Collaboration-crazed as he is, Abloh has stayed admirably committed to Ikea. (Excuse us—“Ikea.”)
Gigi and Bella’s little brother, Anwar, who is both a model and a jewelry designer, appears to have opted out of the family reunion. “Anwar’s actually kind of shy,” Yolanda told W of her son in 2018. “Unless I push him into things, he likes to be in the background and do his thing.” Yolanda, on the other hand, seemed more than happy to return to her roots. (She broke into the industry at 16, before she’d even seen a fashion magazine, and modeled for decades.) For the first time in living memory, the self-proclaimed “mama bear” has yet to post a single photo or video of Bella or Gigi at the show; instead, she’s been flooding her Instagram Stories with reposts of herself.

Yolanda is just the latest surprising model to hit the runway this season. Miley Cyrus made a cameo at Marc Jacobs in New York, Jada Pinkett Smith opened Philipp Plein in Milan, and Lena Dunham made her runway debut at 16Arlington in London.
Related: Supermodel “Mama Bear” Yolanda Hadid on How She Kept Gigi and Bella From Competing With Each Other
The Most Surprising Runway Models at Fashion Week Fall 2020
Miu Miu’s fall 2020 show offered a surprise right off the bat when the 16-year-old Euphoria actress Storm Reid opened in a crinkly orange gown. Reid also recently wore Miu Miu on the Invisible Man press tour, and declared herself a “#miumiugirl” in an Instagram post after the show.
Sasha Luss stuck to the front row at Balmain and Chanel, but she made the leap back to the runway for Givenchy. Aside from a couple of Balmain shows, Luss has stuck almost entirely to campaigns since switching her focus to acting. (She starred in her first feature film, Anna, with Helen Mirren and Luke Evans last year.)
Helena Christensen has been largely absent from the runway since helping Donatella Versace to close out Versace’s spring 2018 show with a supermodel reunion in 2017. But just before Fashion Month came to a close, the 51-year-old jumped back in to the fray with an appearance at Balmain in Paris. Christensen’s 20-year-old model son, Mingus Reedus, also popped up on the runway, at Tommy Hilfiger’s show in London.
Erin Wasson has pivoted to styling, designing, and making TV appearances since dominating the runways in the early aughts. The 38-year-old still regularly stars in campaigns, but it had been years since she’d walked a major show before she joined Christensen at Balmain.
Olivier Rousteing kept the supers coming at Balmain. On the heels of Liya Kebede, Esther Cañadas closed out the show in one of Rousteing’s signature admiral jackets. The 42-year-old, who was a muse to Donna Karan, was everywhere on the runways in the ‘90s, but took a step back from the catwalk in the early aughts.
Yolanda Hadid is more of a front row fixture these days, but for decades the 56-year-old was a regular on the runway. Forty years after Eileen Ford discovered her at age 16—before she’d even seen a fashion magazine—Hadid returned to her roots by joining her daughters Gigi and Bella in walking Off-White’s show in Paris.
It wouldn’t be a Philipp Plein show without controversy. Failing to remove the two giant gilded helicopters from the backdrop of what was supposedly an homage to Kobe Bryant might be one of Plein’s biggest blunders yet, but at least this time it also gave us an opportunity to see a show opened by Jada Pinkett Smith.