On April 28, Matthieu Blazy unveiled his first Cruise collection as Artistic Director of Fashion Activities at Chanel, presenting it at Le Casino Municipal in Biarritz, France.
In his show notes, Blazy wrote: “Far from the Paris salon, Chanel found in Biarritz different ways of being and seeing, of movement and freedom. She made them her fashion pedestal.” He continued: “Among artists, workers, nobility, sailors and the natural world, everyone and everything shared the same stage, living together as a norm. All had a role to play.”
Seated in the front row were Nicole Kidman, Tilda Swinton, Sofia Coppola, and A$AP Rocky. Framed paintings, wrought-iron railings, balconies opening onto the sea, and a runway dusted in the color of sand: the staging itself already read as the opening line of a story.
In 1915, Gabrielle Chanel opened her first couture house in this Basque town. Four years later, in 1919, she invented the very concept of “resort” — designing for women who had shed their corsets in favor of jersey. More than a century on, Blazy steps into that memory, not to recreate history, but to retell it in his own vocabulary.
The opening look was a single black dress. The legendary garment that American Vogue famously called “Chanel’s Ford” in 1926, here read in fine detail and translated for the contemporary body. The large bow at the back — depicted in the original archival sketch but long faded from collective memory — has been reborn as a clutch bag.
“Much is said about the ‘revenge dress’ — this might be considered the original one,” Blazy wrote. The line is anything but grandiose. The black dress had once belonged to servants, nuns, and shopgirls; Gabrielle’s quiet revolution, a century ago, was to make grand ladies want to wear what those women wore. With assured hand, Blazy places that revolution back on the runway.
From there, the collection unfurled with the rhythm of an ebbing and returning tide.
The Basque stripe, drawn from the sailor’s marinière, reappeared in shifting forms. Washed cotton suits called to mind the bleu de travail. Raffia skirts swayed; silk foulards drifted through the air. Knit swim caps were finished with fin-like details, and oversized striped beach paniers traveled across the sand.
The costume jewelry let the geometry of Art Deco architecture breathe quietly: shell earrings, beads shaped like seaweed, and the signature Chanel pearl. Heel-cap shoes moved with ease between salon and shore.
The modesty of French workwear and the brilliance of resort wear flowed, without collision, into a single vocabulary.
The double C, too, returned — not as a logo, but as part of the very architecture of the garment. Blazy carries forward the history of the 1930s, when Gabrielle first wove those sinuous lines into the inner structure of dress. It is, once again, the work of translating the brand’s signature into the language of couture.
“There is no beauty without freedom of the body” — Gabrielle’s words run through the collection like a sustained bass note. The uniforms of working women, the stripes of sailors, the modest black of nuns: as each is lifted to the height of couture, nobility, artists, and laborers walk barefoot together across the same stretch of sand. Hierarchies dissolve, and dress begins to breathe freely.
As the finale approached, the collection slipped into deeper waters. Mermaid-silhouette gowns shimmered with orange and aquamarine paillettes that caught the light like fish scales. Jewelry surfaced like treasure from the seabed. Beadwork echoed shells and coral.
The models’ hair was left wet, swept casually back, as if they had just emerged — goddess-like — from the surf.
To take “freedom” as the central subject of a first Cruise — at a house that carries this much legacy — is, in its own way, a bold choice. And yet Blazy knows how to make Chanel’s familiar codes resonate inside a new physicality. The clothes felt entirely of the moment, and at the same time breathed deeply within their own remembered worlds.
Browse every look from the Chanel Cruise collection in the gallery below.
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