Alex Eala has added Paris to her fashion résumé. The 21-year-old tennis star sat front row at Chanel’s Spring/Summer 2027 show at Paris Fashion Week, her first appearance at the Paris shows, and she brought her mother, Rizza, along with her.

Eala wore a black shirt, washed denim trousers and a tweed jacket, finished with a Chanel bag and oversized sunglasses. Her mother wore a similar Chanel outfit.

“This is an experience of a lifetime for me,” Eala told Vogue Philippines, calling the day surreal. “I’m a Chanel girl through and through so [I’m] just taking it all in.”

From New York to Paris

Paris comes about a month after her New York Fashion Week run in September, when she sat front row three times in one week: Tory Burch, then Michael Kors at the Museum of Modern Art beside longtime Vogue editor Anna Wintour, then Calvin Klein. The influencer analytics platform Lefty later put her Calvin Klein appearance at $502,000 in earned media value for the brand. Earned media value is the estimated worth of the free publicity a guest generates.

Chanel is a bigger stage. It is one of the few houses whose front row gets photographed as closely as its runway, and an invitation there puts Eala in a different conversation from the one she was in at New York.

The Collection

The show was Matthieu Blazy’s third ready-to-wear collection as Chanel’s artistic director. It drew on birdlife and on Coco Chanel’s own legacy.

Back to the Court

The trip falls between two stretches of tennis. Eala skipped Beijing’s China Open, a WTA 1000 event, to play for the Philippines at the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, Japan. She lost in the women’s singles semifinal and went home with a bronze.

Next she goes back to the tour: the Wuhan Open starting October 12, then the Ningbo Open and Japan’s Toray Pan Pacific Open.