Matthieu Blazy took Chanel Cruise back to Biarritz on the beachfront, staging his fifth catwalk show in the Basque resort where Gabrielle Chanel opened a couture house in 1915. The timing was deliberate, the setting unmistakable, and the collection leaned hard into the house’s past while trying to make it feel newly alive.
The show opened with a little black dress marking the centenary year of the look Vogue dubbed “Chanel’s Ford” in 1926, before moving into skirt suits in pink denim and tissue-fine silks worn over sporty tank tops. Models in their 50s and 60s walked the runway, while Kaya, six months pregnant, wore her suit jacket open over her bump and swung a pair of tiny two-tone shoes from her handbag as a gift from Blazy.
The strongest signal of the house’s commercial pull came just off the runway. The day before the show, sales assistants at the Biarritz boutique were holding up Chanel beach towels on the shop floor to carve out extra changing-room space for shoppers, while customers were waiting to buy jeans priced at €3,100 a pair. Bruno Pavlovsky, Chanel’s fashion president, said the brand has “tens of thousands” of VICs, its “very important clients” who spend more than €100,000 a year in-store, and said Chanel has more of them than any other label.
Biarritz is not a random backdrop for the house. Blazy said Gabrielle Chanel watched the swimmers, tanned herself and wore French workwear there, and he folded that history into the collection with a newspaper-print suit carrying headlines about Chanel’s time in the town. A turquoise gown of shimmering pailettes with a train drew on an art deco mural on the Biarritz lighthouse, while huge double-C logos were recast as what Blazy called Chanel’s “rock T-shirt.” He also said, “I like to read the newspaper, like men,” and added, “Also, I like the idea of being on the coast and having fish and chips!”
The tension in the show was between nostalgia and business. Blazy praised the black dress as something Chanel “borrowed... from the workers, from the servant, from the shop girls,” then “decontextualised it and put it on the aristocracy,” calling it “a revenge on her own social status.” Pavlovsky echoed the confidence, saying, “Matthieu’s research is stunning, and it gives him the freedom to twist, to create the Chanel of today and tomorrow.” He said the house does not want “crazy growth,” does not need to move fast and wants to be stronger in 20 years. For Chanel Cruise, that makes the message clear: heritage is not the backdrop to the sale, it is the sale.
