Qin shared her excitement in an Instagram post afterward. "Who would have thought that at the age of 70, I would be standing here on the runway today? Come on! Look! This is Paris! Look! This is the Miu Miu runway!"

She also posted photos of her on the catwalk and backstage on Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like social media platform popular in China.

Qin says that she likes Miu Miu and Prada and started to watch their runway shows in 2006. "When I tried on my outfit, the Miu Miu team decided to make some changes. It was originally a simple gray coat but they wanted it to look more like my own clothes — 'Qin style', as they put it. So I stood for two hours as they sewed on beautiful embellishments by hand," she says.

The brand's news release regarding its Fall and Winter 2024 collection reads: "Concurrent gestures express different moments in life — they coexist within single outfits, just as we each hold simultaneous memories of our own experience. … Girlishness is a word we can revalue, from a pejorative gendered noun, anchored to age, to a universal idiom expressive of the strength of rebellion, a spirit of freedom and individuality, one attribute of a richer whole".

The gray-haired retiree soon went viral, with her followers increasing drastically. Today, Qin has over 33,000 followers on Xiaohongshu and over 16,000 followers on Instagram.