Nico Parker used to steal her mother's Chanel – and she still does
Nico Parker remembers growing up thinking of Chanel as “the fashion brand,” she tells me over the phone from Paris, following the house’s spring/summer 2025 show.
The Last of Us actress was lucky enough to have a mother (the actress Thandiwe Newton) who owned a handful of Chanel pieces. So naturally, their family photo albums are filled with photos of a little Nico, clearly too small for the heels and bags but piling them all on top on her tiny frame anyway, as giddy as any child wearing Chanel would be. Like many girls, she was aware of the power of the French fashion house before she even fully grasped the concept of style.
“Any Chanel bag that my mom owned was the most important thing in the house,” Parker recalls. “I did a lot of stealing those! And I would do fashion shows in her room with her bags and her shoes — a lot of which was Chanel. I have very distinct memories of doing that.”
The habit hasn’t worn off. When she went in for her fitting with the brand ahead of this week's show, Parker borrowed one of her mother's bags. “I was holding it in the fitting, and the team was like, ‘That’s gotta be your mom’s bag!’ because they knew that I wouldn’t have been able to get it any time recently. To this day, I’m going to steal her timeless Chanel classics.”
For the show, the actress — now officially a Chanel fashion and fine jewellery ambassador — wore a cotton and cashmere dress with a black and white fantasy tweed coat, both looks from the Chanel Cruise 2024–25 collection. She accessorised with Coco Crush rings and earrings. The dress was also accessorised with a “cool Chanel belt,” which, Parker tells me through laughter, “I really wanted to steal! And I think they kind of had eyes on me, because they knew my intentions with it…”
The look was easy to decide on because she felt comfortable. “I think it’s important to wear something that feels like you but is also comfortable and lets you be you,” she muses. “It felt like a perfect match of the two. And it felt very much like my personal style. It was comfortable and kind of simple. It felt really me, but also had all the classic Chanel codes to it as well. So I felt very on theme and myself.”
Parker says comfort is a key pillar of her personal style. “I really do prioritise comfort, because I feel like you can really tell when someone isn’t comfortable. I think seeing someone comfortable in their own skin and their clothes is a really attractive quality. It’s important to wear things that feel best to you — not necessarily just what is going on with the trends of the time, if it doesn’t necessarily suit you and your vibe and your aura.”
As for the most recent collection — designed by the Chanel Creative Studio, as the house has been without an artistic director since Virginie Viard stepped down in June — Parker loved how it leaned into a “flirty, fun and freely feminine vibe”. She noted several things that she would love to have in her own wardrobe. “I felt bad for the people next to me, because I actually gasped when I saw this one two-piece that was a pastel yellow and pink. I was immediately taken by it,” she says. “ I was making quite a lot of noise during the show, going, ‘Oh my god, that’s amazing.’” Perhaps she'll invest in some future-classics to be stolen by her own daughter one day.
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