A reunion shot by a music-video auteur, a softer Chanel silhouette, and a quiet shift in how women from Dubai to Riyadh carry their luxury.
Twenty-five years after Kylie Minogue wandered through a kaleidoscope of cloned strangers in the video for “Come Into My World,” she stepped back in front of the same director’s camera. Michel Gondry, the French film-maker who built that dizzying single-take fantasy in 2002, returned to shoot Chanel’s latest handbag campaign, with Margot Robbie sharing the frame. The bag at the heart of all that pop nostalgia is the Chanel 25, and it has quietly become the piece every well-dressed woman in the region seems to be chasing.
The number is no riddle. It marks the year the bag reached stores, after a debut on the Fall-Winter 2024/25 runway. What sets it apart is how relaxed it feels. For decades Chanel taught us that a serious handbag stood to attention, all crisp corners and a clasp that snapped shut like a verdict. The 25 throws out that posture. It slouches. The quilting sits flatter and more modern than the old diamonds, and the chain runs heavier. A leather-laced drawstring tipped with the double C cinches the top, and two slim side pockets swallow a phone without fuss.
It arrives in a spread of sizes, from a palm-sized Mini up to a generous Large, with a backpack for anyone who wants one. The base keeps its shape without turning the thing into a briefcase, and the bag is light enough that you forget you are carrying it. That mix of ease and pedigree is exactly what has helped it travel so far so fast.
Part of the pull is timing. Women are dressing with less ceremony now, reaching for pieces that move with them rather than dictate the day, and a bag that slides from a morning meeting to a late dinner without missing a beat suits the way life actually runs. There is a whiff of the early 2000s in that slouch, the same era Gondry was filming the first time around, and the loop of past and present is part of the charm. It photographs well too, which in a region fluent in the language of social feeds is never beside the point.
Nowhere has the welcome been warmer than across the Gulf. Chanel has long held a particular grip on shoppers in Dubai, Riyadh, Doha and Kuwait City, where a handbag is rarely an afterthought. Here it works as shorthand, read across a room before a word is exchanged. The 25 answers the brief almost too neatly, built for the heat and for a social calendar that does not slow down. Demand has run ahead of what the boutiques can keep on the shelf, which is one reason the regional resale scene has grown so assured. Mad Kicks carrying luxury sneakers and designer bags across the UAE and GCC have turned into a genuine first stop for buyers who would rather skip the waiting list. The range of Chanel handbags now circulating through that market would have been hard to imagine a few seasons ago.
The 25 may be the headline act, yet it sits inside a far broader appetite. The region’s hunger for women’s luxury bags, both new and pre-loved, has matured into something serious, with design-conscious collectors trading and authenticating at a level once reserved for fine watches. Provenance and condition now carry real weight, and a buyer who knows what to look for can move quickly when the right piece surfaces. A bag like the 25 enters that world already coveted, and the talk it generates is half the appeal.
Chanel, for its part, is in no hurry to let it cool. The 25 has surfaced in every major collection since launch, each season bringing fresh leathers, denim, suede and a parade of colours that runs from quiet beige to a high-shine metallic. The Mini takes its own bow in the Minogue campaign, a reminder that the house knows precisely which thread to pull.
What lingers is the mood, not the marketing. Strip away the famous faces and the pop-video homage and you are left with the quiet fact of it, a Chanel bag that finally lets a woman drop her shoulders. From a Dubai mall to a Riyadh sitting room, the 25 has slipped into the rotation like something that was always meant to be there.
