From Toowoomba To Paris Fashion Week: The Dual Worlds Of 67-Year-Old Model Rachel Waller
anything but ordinary
By Victoria Lewis | 8th July 2026An unexpected modelling career has taken 67-year-old Rachel Waller to the runways of Paris and New York, all while maintaining the quiet Toowoomba life she loves.
It’s not often that someone at the height of their career in fashion isn’t consumed by it, but it isn’t ego that sustains Rachel Waller’s remarkable modelling journey, but something else entirely – it’s joy. In fact, it’s strikingly refreshing chatting to Waller, right off the back of six Australian Fashion Week shows, that for her, it’s the thought of spending time among the English roses at the bottom of her garden that incites enthusiasm.
Starting out in modelling at the age of 61 was never part of a lifelong plan; it was serendipity. I ask her how it all started, and she chuckles. It was indeed Waller’s eldest daughter who had secretly sent photographs to a local agency while she was recovering from shoulder surgery in 2019. Call it evolving with age or innate confidence, but when a local modelling agency signed her on the spot in their Brisbane City office, Waller leaned into the unknown, quickly putting her shoulder sling back on after the meeting.
”That was the beginning of something really rather lovely and rather special, and something unexpected,” she reflects, “ which kind of makes it even more extraordinary.”
Fast forward seven years, and Waller has amassed quite the list of accolades. From her runway debut at Brisbane Fashion Festival and countless national campaigns, to signing with IMG Models, one of the world’s leading agencies, and walking in multiple New York and Paris Fashion Weeks, each experience is as dear to her as the last. She simply couldn’t pick a favourite. “I think everything is exceptionally special. When I did Vetements in Paris, and Travis Scott opened and Gigi Hadid [walked] and I was somewhere in the middle – that was rather surreal,” Waller says of the Vetements Spring/Summer 2025 show that was the major talking point of Paris Fashion Week at the time. “And I have to say, I got a lot of kudos from my family for that,” she adds with a smile in her tone.
The jubilation I sense through the phone, as Waller explains to me, comes not at the achievement itself – the kind most models don’t reach at even the pinnacle of their careers – but the joy of working, being part of a creative vision, and having her beloved family cheering her on in the wings. Because, when she’s not in the glare of her jet-setting life as a high-fashion model, she is perfectly content with her quiet, balanced home life in country Toowoomba, one which she describes as “gloriously ordinary”.
Full of objects and trinkets collected during her travels over the years, she considers her 120-year-old, dusty-pink Queenslander and the garden that surrounds it to be her sanctuary. On any given day, you’ll find her out in the sunshine playing with her grandkids, working out in the tin shed nestled at the bottom of her garden, or at a flea market adding to her collection of vintage clothing – and, in her words, “if some bookings come along in between, then that’s just the icing on the cake.”
As for her age, it’s not much of a talking point for Waller. She doesn’t need nor want to be given the mantle of “older model”, but to show up to work like everyone else, simply as herself. “I think fashion is for everybody and I am one of everyone.” She says. “I am a pensioner already, but I have no plans to stop – not just what I’m doing, but working full stop.”
Speaking of her career in full bloom, I ask her what she thinks about in those moments before she steps out onto an international runway. She’s a woman who’s lived all over the globe, bumped shoulders with the industry’s most coveted names, and truly achieved the extraordinary; but what else would she be thinking about other than her grandkids back home – far away, probably tucked in bed, and dreaming of frolicking in grandma’s garden.
Imagery: @rachelwaller__ / Claudia Smith at After Winter Agency
