Dedi-CAT-ed Follower of Fashion..?

[~ vortex ~]

Why is the stage at fashion shows called a catwalk?

[joko]

i suppose its because cats are known to be able to walk along very thin things like tops of fences and ledges etc and a catwalk is a long thin walkway....

[stewey]

And perhaps also because a lot of the models seem to slink along the catwalk in a feline manner?

[Quizmonster]

'Catwalk' in the fashion-show sense is very recent, being recorded nowhere before the 1970s. In earlier times, it had been used to mean a narrow garden, a passage in an airship, a pathway one brick wide leading across fields during World War I and so on. So, whilst Stewey's idea of slinky models being partly responsible for the meaning is an engaging one, it's not so! Joko's cat-reference is almost certainly the correct one.

[stewey]

Actually, Quizmonster, I was agreeing with joko and his explanation. That is why I prefaced my contribution with "and perhaps also".

[joko]

stewey, i wonder if the notion that they were walking down a CATwalk, in fact made the models subconsciously feel catlike and feline without realising it, and so affected their slinky strut...?

[Quizmonster]

I did notice the "and perhaps", Stewey, so I wasn't claiming that you were disagreeing with Joko. However, I felt that the questioner should know that your interesting notion was not really an additional relevant factor in the word's origin/meaning.
And I'm pretty sure that models walk the way they do because that's how their 'handlers' tell them to, in order to achieve maximum effect, rather than an attempt to be catlike. There were fashion shows with models walking thus long before the word 'catwalk' was ever associated with their platform.
But what the hey!