By Spooky on April 14th, 2025 Category: News
Christiano Wennmann was making pizza at a trendy New York pizzeria when he was first noticed by a famous fashion designer’s assistant. Now’s he’s walking the runway at big fashion events and posing for magazines.
24-year-old Christiano Wennmann became an overnight sensation in the fashion modelling world after owning the catwalk at this year’s Paris Fashion Week for New York designer Willy Chavarria. He was making pizza at Scarr’s, in New York’s Lower East Side, when he was noticed by one of Chavarria’s assistants, just weeks before the big fashion event, and asked to model the designer’s underwear collection. Things only got crazier from there, as Chavarria and his team loved him from the very start and immediately asked him to come to Paris. Obviously overwhelmed, the young pizzaiolo realized this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and accepted. Now, he’s one of the hottest male models in the business.
“While I was at that shoot, they were like, ‘I don’t know how we haven’t seen you before; you gotta come to Paris,’” Wennmann recalled his meteoric rise to fame. “I was like, ‘Oh s – – t! Okay, I’m down.’ The next thing you know, I’m booking a flight to France.”
Going from Scarr’s pizzeria to the catwalk of the year’s most important fashion event wasn’t exactly a seamless transition, but Christiano credits Willy Chavarria and his team for helping him deal with the nerves. The popular designer told him he was there for a reason and that he was “already a star”, and that gave him the boost of confidence he needed to go out on the catwalk.
Christiano Wennmann made such a good impression during his first modeling event that he was promptly signed by a major modeling agency, worked with designers like Sami Miro, and got featured in prominent fashion magazines like HERO and Dazed.
It’s been an unbelievable ride for Wennmann, whose Instagram blew up thanks to his new career, but he’s not letting the fame go to his head. He is still working at Scarr’s, and says he doesn’t plan on quitting his day job anytime soon, as it helps keep him grounded.
“Customers will be like, ‘Were you the guy who went to Paris?’” he told The New York Post. “But I’m still making pizza. Modeling doesn’t change who I am. I’m the same person I was before all of this happened. It’s very important for me to stay true to who I am. I don’t want to forget where I came from.”
Christiano’s amazing story is reminiscent of other rags-to-riches stories we have featured over the years, like that of street cleaner turned fashion model Noppajit “Meen” Somboonsate, Maleesha Kharwa, or Filipina street beggar Rita Gaviola.
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