Awar Odhiang Is Industry Votes Model of the Year on Models.com

Top model Awar Odhiang received a lovely honor today as the Models.com Industry’s Vote for Model of the Year: Women.

She’s had many high moments in her five-years career, but Odhiang’s October 2025 closing of Mathieu Blazy’s debut as Creative Director of Chanel sent most of us soaring into its spontaneous joy and beauty. Read AOC’s response.

A Fashion Show Closing to Remember: ‘Just Do You’ Blazy Told Her

The new Model of the Year winner told Vogue about the Chanel closing:

“It was completely unscripted and spontaneous and in the moment, I was speaking with Matthieu before the show, and I’ve always just been so excited and happy for him, he is an incredible person in and outside of fashion,” she adds. “He had told me, ‘This is your moment, this is a chance for you to just enjoy it, do what you do, and do you,’” Odhiang recalls, “and so that’s exactly what I did.”

I promised recently to share a tribute about Awar that appeared on photographer Rafael Pavaroti’s IG. Raf included Awar in a Chanel exclusive story for Vogue’s December issue. His words about the moment affected me deeply and expressed exactly what was going through my own mind in that moment when Awar Odhiang broke formation like a filly running in the home stretch of the Kentucky Derby.

Watching her make that runway her own — note, Odhiang and Blazy are very tight — you knew that Awar Odhiang is a thoroughbred filly who is destined to live in the winner’s circle. She is going to win the race.

Here are Raf Pavarotti’s sentiments about this incredible moment:

The night you closed the Chanel show, something shifted in the universe.
It wasn’t just fashion, it was energy, it was history folding and unfolding at once.
Under the full moon, a portal opened, and for a brief, infinite second, the world remembered what joy feels like.

You walked carrying more than fabric and form, you carried memory, lineage, possibility. You reminded us that joy is not decoration; joy is power.
In some African traditions, joy comes before love and maybe that’s why you felt like a beginning.

This photograph is not only about beauty. It’s about the vibration that moves through us when we see ourselves, when we recognize something ancient and luminous returning.
It’s about every girl who will grow up believing that her presence can rewrite the light.
It’s about the pulse of the future, loud, colorful, unstoppable.

You reminded us that joy is resistance, that laughter is sacred, that unity is not a dream but a force.
And that the world, when reflected through your smile, looks like a promise kept.

Thank you for opening the portal, for reminding us that the future is already here, and that it dances, it glows, it laughs.

With love and reverence to this joy,
Raf