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In the teaser video for Chanel’s Cruise 2026/27 collection, model Noor Khan enjoys what looks to be the world’s most carefree day at the beach. Dressed in a striped tweed ensemble reminiscent of a 1920s bathing suit, she skips along a shoreline, clambers over jagged rocks, and presses her cheek into the sand. Diving underwater, she briefly transforms into a mermaid, her forked tail flipping out from under the choppy waves. When she emerges, dressed in a gown of shimmering scales with fin-like ruffles along the neckline, she is as close to a mythical sea creature as a human woman can get.
In that minute-long video, all of the defining elements of Matthieu Blazy’s debut Cruise collection for Chanel can be found. Firstly, the location, shot in dramatic black and white: Biarritz, the Basque coastal town where Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel opened her first couture boutique in 1915. Freed from the constraints of Parisian tailoring etiquette, Chanel was able to design breezy, nonchalant clothing for clients who summered abroad, serving as the precursor to decades of couture excellence. For this season’s Cruise showing, Biarritz was inextricable from the designs, becoming a character in and of itself.
Then the collection’s sense of movement: in keeping with Chanel’s history of freeing women through clothing, Blazy designed a series of pared-down essentials that would look equally chic during a beachside romp as they would at a refined holiday lunch. The collection’s title, Sous Le Salon La Plage, translates to ‘Underneath The Salon, The Beach’—painting a nonchalant picture of a woman sliding out of the water and into a full day of engagements.
And finally, that sense of spontaneity, as though if you wore this collection on vacation, something magical and impossible might happen. On the runway, it was seen in the whimsy of seashell earrings, fishnet dresses, and pearlescent clutches inlaid with golden sea creatures. Noor Khan, alongside fellow model Josephen Akuei, did indeed make an appearance as a Chanel mermaid, with the pair closing the show in iridescent gowns embellished with pailletes mimicking fish scales.
It was in this push and pull between sandy shores and salon life, playfulness and practicality, that Blazy’s Cruise 2027 collection took shape. Presented to an A-list crowd of attendees (think Nicole Kidman, ASAP Rocky, and Tilda Swinton), the show took place in Biarritz—where else?—at Le Casino Municipal. The Art Deco building was fitted with floor-to-ceiling mirrors as a nod to Chanel’s historic boutique in the city.
The opening look, a classically Chanel little black dress, also drew from the maison’s history, referencing an archival sketch from the 1920s. Blazy referred to it as the “original revenge dress”, so striking was its similarity to servant and shopgirl uniforms at a time when fussy couture prevailed. This sense of ease, where clean lines and sleek silhouettes prioritised movement over all, carried over into a series of designs inspired by regional workwear. Lightweight French chore coats, washed denim, and Basque-striped foulard dresses abounded.
Then, of course, there was the sense of playfulness woven throughout. It didn’t quite reach the heights of Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel—no life-sized cruise ships or beaches recreated at the Grand Palais—but there were nods to this theatricality. A larger-than-life beach panier, in particular, recalled Lagerfeld’s giant hula-hoop bag from Spring/Summer 2013. Whole seashells were placed over the ears of some models, while others wore old-timey bathing suit caps. The shoes, too, seemed destined to go instantly viral: barely-there “heel caps” that had models’ toes sinking into the plush, sand-coloured carpet. (“Will the price be half off, too?” asked many an online comment sardonically.)
There was an interplay of lightness and heaviness between many of the looks; some saw tweed shaped into sleek bathing suits, while others were full gowns in stark black or striking newspaper print. As Blazy told style commentator Beka Gvishiani—better known online as Stylenotcom—some of the gowns were originally intended for January’s Haute Couture collection. When it became clear that the couture offering was more about barely-there lightness, the more structured gowns found a new home in Cruise. Similarly, many spotted the throughline between the raffia-knit, parasol-inspired skirts and Blazy’s maxi-skirt designs for Bottega Veneta.
A Cruise collection was the final item in a long list of firsts for Blazy at Chanel, which made it all the more fitting that he turned back to the archives for guidance. It was also fitting, and a sign of his growing confidence at the maison’s helm, that he wove history so skilfully with his present-day tastes. It was a joyful blurring of boundaries that felt classically Chanel. “From the functionality of the black dress to the fiction of the mermaid, a new Chanel folklore is formed,” stated the collection notes. When Khan and Akuei took their final lap as Chanel mermaids, their presence felt as grounded in reality as it did in myth.
Below, see the best looks from Chanel’s Cruise 2026/2027 collection.
This story was first published on GRAZIA Singapore.
