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Not a week goes by that I’m not reminded by someone I work with of the time I Irish danced down #JeanPaulGaultier’s runway in 2007. To be honest, the fact people still remember it all these years later is amazing to me, especially because there was literally only ONE smart phone in the audience that year that captured the show and posted it to YouTube 13 years ago. When I did my fitting for the show @jpgaultierofficial had already decided on a Scottish themed soundtrack and that's when he found out I was randomly trained in Irish dance before modeling. Scottish and Irish dance are very different but it was his idea to combine the two and have me open the show doing something really special. He left it up to me to come up with the choreography, which made me more than a little nervous. I’d walked in quite a few fashion shows before, but this was the first time I'd done any kind of special “performance”. Would people like it or think it was bizarre? Would I, blinded by lights, leap right over the edge of the catwalk into Anna Wintour’s lap on the front row? I had no idea. The dance was a big success, I didn’t fall off the runway, and @voguemagazine magazine later named it the “Coco Moment”. I think people were just so surprised to see me do such an obscure dance down such a very very long runway. I didn't expect people would remember it past that season but they have, and still do, even now years later. After this show in 2007 Jean Paul continued to bring me all sorts of fantastic ideas for his runway - one year it was a mud fight, another I was a mermaid with a real fish tale. Once I was on a giant 20 foot swing and another time I was literally in a wheel barrow. There was never a shortage of fun ideas with #JPG and I was always up for every one of them all.
