Save the date and grab your tickets for the 2025 Runway Extravaganza Fashion Show presented by An Affair to Remember. Join the fun and pageantry of one of the biggest annual fashion shows in Fayetteville at the Crown Complex on Saturday, Jan. 11 at 7 p.m.
Highlighting not only prom, pageant and formal wear, but women’s empowerment and impact, this fashion show elevates what it means to celebrate HER. Tickets can be purchased online and range from $25 general admission to $70 premiere row and table tickets, which include entry into the $250 raffle (must be present to win) and a $25 voucher for An Affair to Remember.
Proceeds from the event go to CEED for Women in Business for 2025's HER Week held in March. Attendees will enjoy a fabulous fashion show featuring the latest in pageant wear, formal ware, mother of the bride, mother of the groom, and evening wear, as well as a Giavonni Couture trunk show, a Giavonni Mother of the Bride show, and a prom trunk show.
Nothing marks an event's success more than its longevity and ability to bring in a crowd year after year. That’s exactly what the Runway Extravaganza Fashion Show has been doing for 15 years now, drawing an attendance of around 800 each year. Kathy Keefe Jensen, owner of An Affair to Remember and Fayetteville City Council Member of District 1, holds the helm of this production and is the visionary of its conception.
“This is number 15. It was fully grown about 18 years ago. Caroline Swain [from the Crown], said, ‘you know we really want to do a fashion show’. Some other local business people called me in and said, ‘we have this great idea to do this big fashion show.’ I’d been doing little fashion shows, it was so much work and it was a lot,” Jensen said. “They said this is what we want to do. We’ll do the decorations, we’ll do this, we’ll do that. I’m like, okay, I can do this. But I have to be prepared. I’m not going to just throw it together. It took me about two years, [I] had to talk to my vendors, my designers, and tried to figure out how to make it happen. We had our first one in the hospitality room at the Crown. I’ve had some partners and I learned that our business is such a niche, that maybe we needed to do it on our own and so we just continued to do it … It has been an experience.”
Every year has seen growth for the event including the models that participate, growing from 25 to now 120 and still growing. Models for the show are customers of An Affair to Remember and members of The Women of Power, a nonprofit organization founded by Jensen that recognizes and “is a celebration of women that have demonstrated leadership by contributing to the community through volunteerism, entrepreneurship, or public service.”
The fashion show goes far beyond the glitz, glam and dresses. It’s a night to celebrate the empowerment and impact of women and raise money to pour back into the organizations that bring resources to women.
CEED has received $25,000 from proceeds raised by the event.
“Our proceeds go to the Women in Business for HER Week. We give out grants and started the HER Pitch. That name started because we did it at the baseball park … We’re setting little seeds and getting women involved and is one of my greatest things about women of power,” Jensen explained.
The Runway Extravaganza is a full production and Jenson could not do it without sponsors, including Mercedes Benz, the community, her staff at An Affair to Remember, this year’s professional choreographer, Freddie Lee from Raleigh, and of course, her husband and sons, who take on the heavy lifting and emotional support.
Jensen is excited about this year and for the future of the event and its impact and empowerment of the future generation of women in the community.

(Photo: A model during a Runway Extravaganza poses at the end of the runway at the Crown Complex.)