【Smile Down the Runway】Drama x Slice of Life! Story about an amateur model and a talented designer, as they try to make it in the fashion industry!!

Smile Down the Runway is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kotoba Inoya.

This series was serialized in Kodansha’s Weekly Shounen Magazine from May 2017 to July 2021. It’s chapters are compiled and collected into 22 separate volumes. This manga series portrays the modeling and the fashion industry with accuracy.

An anime television series adaptation by Ezo’la was released, consisting of 12 episodes.

The story begins with a 10 year old, Fujito Chiyuki, aspiring to become a top model at her father’s modeling agency, Mille Neige. She is greatly inspired by Shizuku-san, the model who represented his fathers agency in Paris.

At the age of 10, Chiyuki is 158cm in height and judging by her growth spurt, every model at the agency believed that she’ll reach 175cm, the required height for a model, really soon. But, a few years later, she is in her final year of high school, without gaining a single centimeter.

She still hasn’t given up on her dream, as she keeps auditioning at her agency, but keeps getting rejected over and over again, with Shizuku-san even calling it impossible for her.

She later comes across a fellow student, Tsumura Ikuto, a quiet introverted kid with a bowl haircut, who has a passion for designing clothes.

When she says to Tsumura that he should become a fashion designer, his face gets gloomy as he explains that almost all of the fashion agencies require a degree from a fashion school as minimum requirement and that he can’t afford a school like that.

Furthermore, Tsumura has three younger siblings who have their own passions. He wants his siblings to follow their dreams without any worry of money, and to do that he will sacrifice his dream to work and make money for them.

For a moment Chiyuki agrees with him saying that it’s impossible for him to get into the fashion industry without a fashion degree. She then realizes that she just used the word ‘impossible’, a word being said to her ever since she was a kid, aiming to crush her dreams, she grabs him by the collar and tells him not to give up and offers to give him her old clothes so that he can make her a dress for her next audition. He agrees.

She wears the dress designed by Tsumura and heads to audition at her father’s agency again. Shizuku-san is waiting for her, ready to reject her again, but when Chiyuki enters the room, she is mesmerized and for a second, she glimpses her walking down the ramp in the Paris fashion show.

Seeing how the dress compliments Chiyukis beauty, she sees no other choice but to accept her into the agency.

The dress Chiyuki was wearing makes it into a magazine and becomes so popular that orders start pouring from all over. Chiyuki’s father, owner of Mille Neige, calls in Tsumura and offers him a job at his agency as a fashion designer.

And thus begin the journey of Chiyuki and Tsumura as they start their lives in the fashion and modeling industry.