Bella Thorne easily could have gone the princess route with her look for Coperni’s Spring 2025 show at Disneyland Paris. A Cinderella-coded ball gown wouldn’t have been out of place at the theme park’s first-ever fashion show held on Oct. 1, where creative directors Sebastien Meyer and Arnaud Vaillant launched fireworks over the castle and dressed Kylie Jenner like a 2024 Maleficent to shut down the runway. But Thorne has a different connection to the “Happiest Place on Earth,” one that encouraged her to dress more like herself than a generic Belle.
Thorne is now directing, acting, and designing a jewelry line, but she got her big break as a teen on the Disney Channel. “Back in the days, me and Z—” as in her former Shake It Up co-star, Zendaya— “performed [at Disneyland Paris], I think quite a few times if I remember correctly,” Thorne tells me with a laugh hours before she’d arrive in Coperni's front row. “I think I was 15 the last time I was there. It's definitely been quite a bit of time, so I'm excited to see it older and be there at such a different time in my life.”
The actress and entrepreneur’s personal style has come a long way since her teen concerts. Nowhere has that been more evident than at Paris Fashion Week, where she attended Vetements in a leather moto jacket styled as a shirt and Coperni in a satin, rosette-adorned dress with a gigantic, butter yellow faux fur coat over the top. This second look, she says, sent a message from the front row: “I'm feeling incredibly confident in my own skin again. And I'm really excited to grow and to show this new part. I'm older, I'm wiser, and I feel good.”
Thorne thought about her Coperni look as a lesson in contrasts: the femininity of her ruffled, dusty champagne midi dress with the over-the-top opulence of her outerwear. (This may have been a runway at Disney, but she calls it her “Big Bird coat.”) “I wanted to marry my natural rebellious aesthetic with an elevated, almost avant garde elegance,” she explains. An extra bit of magic made its way into the look through a periwinkle blue Coperni handbag and matching mules coated in gemstones.
With hairstylist Kevin Jacotot and makeup artist Erica Monteiro, Thorne landed on a clean, swept-back updo and a glowy, minimal beauty beat to highlight her dress. The simplicity intended to show off the stack of barbed-wire earrings and curved hoops she designed through her Thorne jewelry label. “They bring back that edge factor of Bella—I don't want that to get lost,” she says.
Feeling ready for the front row wasn’t only about getting dressed; getting in the right mindset with her team mattered, too. “Right before we walk out, we talk about how good each person did at their own job, that's really nice and it makes me feel more confident too, hearing everybody's opinions,” Thorne says. “We're all in this together. We're going to war. Let's f–cking go!”
A rooftop photo session with photographer Mohamed Zalloufi and a car ride to the park later, Bella Thorne appeared to have a fairytale return to the landmark of her early career. She mingled with Alix Earle in the front row, took in the expansive runway collection, and in storybook fashion, left her Coperni bejeweled slippers behind at midnight. “I brought my Hokas that are a very similar color to the dress,” she says. “I'm hoping nobody notices them and will let me get away with walking around for the rest of the night because I'm like, how am I gonna get on these rides in these heels?”
