Mermaids, revenge dresses and sea air: Matthieu Blazy takes Chanel back to its beginnings in Biarritz with his first Cruise collection for the house
For his first Cruise collection for Chanel, Matthieu Blazy returned not simply to a location but to a founding idea. Biarritz – the seaside town where Gabrielle Chanel first loosened fashion from the strictures of the Parisian salon – became the axis of the collection. “Far from Paris, Chanel found in Biarritz different ways of being and seeing, of movement and freedom,” Blazy notes. “She made them her fashion pedestal. It is a place that offers the perfect balance between function and fiction. 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.” That spirit shapes the collection.
The show began with – and continually revisited – one of Chanel’s most decisive gestures: the little black dress. First introduced in 1926, it appeared here in close dialogue with its original archival sketch, reminding audiences that what now reads as timeless once registered as radical. “I imposed black; it is still going strong today, for black wipes out everything else around,” Chanel famously declared. Blazy sharpened the point further: “Much is said about the ‘revenge dress’ – this might be considered the original one.”
From there, the Basque stripe ran through the lineup like a horizon line, echoing the Atlantic shimmer visible through the windows of the Le Casino Municipal venue – just steps from the address where Gabrielle first established her couture presence in 1915. Sailor uniforms slipped into seaside leisurewear, then into evening silhouettes, while washed cotton canvas suuiting suggested sea and salt. Fluttering silk foulard ensembles and rustling raffia skirts captured the pleasure of dressing, and undressing, by the water. The bathing suit, unsurprisingly, emerged as a central proposition.
Accessories extended this sense of movement between worlds. Bags ranged from small valises to oversized striped beach paniers; waterproof flaps appeared alongside pala carriers. Shoes shifted just as easily between registers, from elegant Art Deco heels to barefoot “heel caps”. Jewellery followed suit, pairing architectural references with aquatic ones: shell earrings resting close to the ear, before the collection resolved in a final passage of shimmering, amphibious looks covered in paillettes in coral, gold and sea-glass green – part woman, part mermaid. A new collection, a new context, but Blazy's same sense of joyfulness and wearability persists.
See the full Chanel Cruise 2026/27 collection below.
