Kaya Wilkins Talks Walking the Chanel Runway With “The World’s Youngest Model”
From maternity-friendly tweed to children's Mary Janes, Matthieu Blazy is turning his Chanel into a family affair.
Reported by Vogue.
Matthieu Blazy just proved that pregnancy doesn't have to mean stepping back from the spotlight—it can be the whole point. At Chanel's resort 2027 show in Biarritz this afternoon, Jersey-born model and musician Kaya Wilkins walked the runway five months pregnant, her belly a deliberate design choice rather than an inconvenient fact to hide. Wilkins, who's expecting her first child, received the call just days before the show. "Matthieu and Anita [Bitton], the casting director, were specifically looking for a pregnant model," she tells Vogue, still glowing from her Chanel debut. "I was quite lucky to have a little bump on me."
The styling was perfectly calibrated for this moment: a black-and-white tweed skirt suit, a knit bra, high-waisted bikini pants, and those red-hot chili pepper earrings—all requiring minimal tweaking. Blazy's real genius was in the accessories. Miniature children's shoes dangled from the chain of an accompanying bag, a cheeky nod to the family beach walks you could practically see unfolding against the southwestern French coastline. (Even A$AP Rocky, front-row fixture and fashion's accidental dad, was spotted with a matching pink flap bag and tiny shoes.) The whole effect: maternity wear that doesn't whisper apologies.
Comfort as radical act
Wilkins' own closet has been reduced to two pairs of trousers that still fit, so slipping into Chanel's flowing tweed felt less like a fashion moment and more like relief. "I'm not galumphing around with my bump out, so it was cool—it felt quite freeing," she says. The runway became permission to take up space without contortion, to move through the world pregnant and unapologetic. That casual, almost throwaway comment—delivered between bites of backstage catering—is doing some heavy lifting: fashion acknowledging bodies as they actually exist.
The choice to debut this vision in Biarritz, where Coco Chanel opened her first boutique over a century ago, wasn't accidental either. Blazy's showin the brand's spiritual home signals something bigger than a single collection. His aesthetic has always been rooted in Chanel's archives, remixed with a contemporary, slightly irreverent twist. A pregnant model in a tweed suit isn't a departure from that vision—it's an evolution, proof that heritage doesn't have to mean constraint.
When luxury fashion finally stops treating pregnancy as something to conceal and starts treating it as a legitimate design challenge, that's when things get interesting.
Read the original at Vogue.
