On 28 April, the Casino Municipal in Biarritz, France did something unusual for a building of its age and elegance: it disappeared. Inside, Chanel had transformed the Art Deco seafront venue entirely ahead of the Chanel Cruise 2026 show – beige deep-pile carpet laid across its floors, mirrored columns doubled the natural light and acid-bright floral arrangements punctuated the room with something dream-like. Through the windows: the Atlantic. On the chairs: Tara Emad, Nicole Kidman, Tilda Swinton, Marion Cotillard, Michaela Coel, Sofia Coppola, Charlotte Casiraghi and A$AP Rocky, Chanel’s newest global ambassador, in a camel suede jacket with tweed trim and a pink Chanel bag. Over 900 guests attended across two shows. The energy, by all accounts, was electric.
This is the context in which Matthieu Blazy presented his first-ever cruise collection for Chanel and arguably the most personal the House has ever seen. Blazy grew up coming to Biarritz on holiday. He knows its quality of light, the flurry of the Atlantic wind, the way the Basque stripe appears across beach umbrellas, kitchen linens and the hulls of boats with equal democratic ease. He chose this place not as a picturesque backdrop but as an argument – returning to the precise coast where Gabrielle Chanel first learned that fashion could be built from observation: of swimmers, sailors and a world in motion.
The collection is titled Sous Le Salon La Plage – under the salon, the beach – an echo of the famous 1998 slogan sous les pavés, la plage (under the cobblestones, the beach). The politics of that phrase are not incidental. Chanel going to Biarritz in 1915 was a re-founding of fashion. Among sailors and aristocrats, artists and workers, she observed how bodies actually moved through the world, and she designed accordingly. In her ‘rebellious’ jersey and sportswear, she freed women from the literal constraints of the salon. The outdoors demanded practicality; practicality became the new luxury. Blazy understands this history in his bones, and this Cruise 2026 collection is the proof.
Seventy-nine looks. The range is extraordinary and encapsulates everything from featherlight knit sets in the spirit of the 1920s to billowing ballgowns, fluttering silk foulard ensembles and rustling raffia skirts. Retro swimsuits came paired with swimming caps in a nod to Chanel’s 1942 ballet Le Train Blue, created with Picasso and Cocteau. Model Noor Khan closed the show in a turquoise sequinned gown with a fishtail hem, shimmering like something that had just emerged from the Atlantic.
The abundance is the point. Blazy has spoken about seeing a hand-coloured photograph of the Biarritz shoreline from 1910 – all Basque-striped beach tents in glorious, chaotic profusion – and deciding that restraint would be the wrong answer. The result holds its richness with total conviction. Fish-scale paillettes shimmer like the sea itself. Fluid silks mimic the movement of water. Springy tweeds carry the weight of the landscape without resorting to pastiche. Beaded knits catch and reflect light. The Basque stripe threads through everything, on fabrics drawn from traditional home linens and on a sailor stripe quarter-zip that is, notably, Blazy’s own personal uniform.
The double C is recontextualised. Blazy frames it not as branding – which at most Houses is the beginning and end of the logo conversation – but as architecture. Its sinuous contours, radically introduced to clothing in the 1930s, become structural elements within the garments themselves: load-bearing, not decorative. It is Chanel’s autobiography and manifesto written directly into cloth. The wearer, Blazy proposes, is now free to add her own chapter.
A fashion show is never only the clothes, and Chanel more than understood that. The front row was a statement in and of itself. Kidman in a backless black Chanel dress; Cotillard in a black midi slip with kitten-heel mules, elegant without noise; Charlotte Casiraghi in the Charvet shirt from Blazy’s debut collection – the one that paid tribute to Gabrielle’s great love Boy Capel – worn with barrel-cut black trousers and crocodile-effect heels. A$AP Rocky in colour, cutting through the monochrome with a pink Chanel bag and a personality to match. Tilda Swinton in a gold camellia-buttoned shirt and matching blazer. Sofia Coppola – who once interned in Chanel’s Paris studio at fifteen – in a straight tweed shirt-dress. Every seat told a story about where the House is going and who it wants beside it.
As the finale arrived, models walked to Charles Aznavour’s soaring ballad Emmenez-Moi. The room rose to its feet. Nicole Kidman, asked whether she might one day play Coco Chanel on screen, said that she had far too much respect for Gabrielle Chanel to contemplate it and that Chanel plays herself, constantly, through the pen of Matthieu Blazy.
Rewatch the Chanel Cruise 2026/27 show here
