In May 2026, Sora Choi did something almost no model in modern fashion has done: she walked a Chanel runway visibly pregnant, one hand cradling her belly, and turned a couture show into headline news across two continents. It was a fitting plot twist for a woman who has spent a decade making the fashion industry adjust to her rather than the other way around — the self-described shy, timid girl from Bucheon who became, by the numbers, one of the busiest and most decorated runway models of her generation. Hers is a career built quietly and relentlessly, by a woman who rarely courts the press and lets the runways speak for her.
From a Bucheon casting to the global runway
Sora Choi (Korean: 최소라) was born on 5 September 1992 in Bucheon, South Korea, and went on to study modelling at Dongduk Women’s University. By her own account she was “a very shy and timid girl” — a personality the high-pressure international circuit would, paradoxically, draw out of her. Her entry into fashion is one of the industry’s better discovery stories: she reportedly accompanied a nervous friend to a casting call and walked away as the one with the offer. Her breakthrough came on television, when she won Korea’s Next Top Model, Season 3, in 2012, at the age of twenty-one — a victory that made her a known quantity in the Korean market, and the cover of W Korea, before she ever set foot on a Western runway.
The work: a record-setting workhorse
Choi made her first international runway appearance opening Christopher Raeburn’s Spring 2014 show, but her true global debut came in May 2014, at Louis Vuitton’s Cruise show in Monaco. Vuitton became foundational to her career: for the Spring 2015 season the house’s creative director, Nicolas Ghesquière, chose her as an exclusive for Paris Fashion Week — reportedly the first South Korean model to receive that honour — and she remained a Vuitton fixture across the seasons that followed. A second landmark first came in Spring 2016, when she became the first Asian model to walk Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent, a house then notorious for a narrow casting aesthetic.
From there Choi became a runway workhorse with elite-tier range, walking for Prada, Chanel, Dior, Gucci, Miu Miu, Versace, Fendi, Calvin Klein, Valentino, Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen, Burberry, Balenciaga, Givenchy and Hermès, among many others. The volume is staggering: in 2019 she walked eighty-nine shows, more than any other model that fashion year, and by 2024 she had reportedly walked over five hundred shows and appeared on some seventeen Vogue covers across the American, British, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Spanish editions. On the campaign side she has fronted scores of luxury advertisements — for Saint Laurent, Louis Vuitton, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, Bottega Veneta, Tom Ford and Burberry among them — plus beauty contracts with Estée Lauder, Lancôme and NARS, shot by the industry’s most demanding photographers, from Steven Meisel to Inez & Vinoodh.
To walk eighty-nine shows in a single season is not merely an endurance feat; it is a vote of confidence cast by nearly every major house at once, and it placed Choi at the centre of the runway calendar season after season. Few models of any background have been booked so relentlessly by the industry’s most exacting designers, and fewer still have sustained that pace while remaining a fixture of the most coveted campaigns. The numbers — the show counts, the cover tallies, the brand contracts — add up to one of the most prolific runway careers of the 2010s and 2020s, built not on a single breakout moment but on a decade of being the model casting directors reached for first.
Cultural impact
Choi’s significance runs deeper than her booking count. She arrived as Western runways were under sustained criticism for the tokenistic casting of Asian models, and she became a living counter-example: not a “diversity slot” but a top-of-call-sheet opener and closer that the biggest houses competed to book first. Vogue called her one of the most popular faces on the runways as early as 2016, and she is consistently named, alongside HoYeon Jung, as one of the Korean models most responsible for normalising Asian faces at the very top of the Western luxury hierarchy. In October 2021 the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism issued her a formal commendation — a state-level recognition of her value as a cultural export.
The Private Side
Choi married the Korean photographer Kove Lee in August 2019, in a ceremony in Bali. The couple kept a notably low profile for the next several years — and then, in May 2026, after seven years together, her agency confirmed she was pregnant, news she chose to reveal in the most Sora Choi way imaginable: by walking a Chanel show in Seoul with a visible baby bump. The decision drew a wave of coverage precisely because pregnant models on the runway are so vanishingly rare, and because it was so characteristic of a model who has always preferred to make the industry come to her.
Earnings and net worth
There is no reliable, primary-sourced net-worth figure for Sora Choi. The numbers that circulate online come only from celebrity-finance aggregator sites with no disclosed methodology, and should be treated with heavy scepticism rather than as fact. What is documented is the foundation beneath any estimate: more than five hundred runway shows, dozens of luxury campaigns, beauty contracts with three global houses, and a decade of editorial work for the world’s most demanding magazines.
Where she is now
After a roughly year-long runway hiatus, Choi made a high-profile return, appearing in the Dolce & Gabbana Spring/Summer 2025 campaign shot by Steven Meisel and closing the Prada Fall/Winter 2025 show in Milan. In interviews she has signalled a deliberate pivot away from chasing show counts and toward editorial work that genuinely inspires her — and, as of mid-2026, she is expecting her first child, having announced it, of course, on a Chanel runway.