Wet looks

Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel Cruise 2026/27 show in Biarritz felt, above all, like an invitation, one that extended beyond the salon and into something looser, saltier, and altogether more liberating. “Far from the Paris salon, Chanel found in Biarritz different ways of being and seeing, of movement and freedom,” Blazy writes in the accompanying notes, and you could sense that spirit not just in the clothes, but in the way the audience itself seemed to exhale upon arrival. 

There is something novel about Blazy returning Chanel to Biarritz, the city where Gabrielle Chanel opened her couture house and presented her first collections. Here, she proposed a different rhythm of dressing – one dictated not by social codes, but by the body in motion, by sea air and sand underfoot. Blazy, in his first Cruise outing for the house re-energises this history. The result is a collection that balances function and fiction with a confidence that is quickly becoming his signature, as if he were picking up a conversation Coco began but never finished.

And confidence is, I think, the key word in understanding the momentum behind Blazy’s Chanel. The frenzy that greeted his first ready-to-wear collection in March was more than just the industry’s reflexive excitement at a new name on the label; it had the unmistakable whiff of retail gold. In an era where the distance between runway spectacle and wardrobe utility can feel vast, Blazy has already begun to collapse that divide, giving the customer who doesn’t balk at the steep price rises a clear reason to invest.

His Métiers d’Art show, staged in a New York subway, offered an early clue. There, among the contradictions of urban life – grit and glamour, precarity and excess – he doubled down on the house’s investment in craft. Chanel’s long-standing commitment to its ateliers reads under Blazy as a living system. Very expensive clothes were in a setting where luxury is usually absent which somehow made the clothes feel even more of this moment.

Then came couture in January, where Blazy leaned into a more overtly fantastical register. The “mermaid” impulse –shimmering surfaces, elongated lines, transparent fabrics – played out against a surreal set of oversized mushrooms, as if Alice had wandered into the Grand Palais. Yet even at its most theatrical and dreamlike, there was an underlying logic of construction, a fascination with how fabric can mimic, distort and enhance the body. I remember looking around that mushroom forest and thinking that he was quietly testing how elastic Chanel’s codes could be without snapping.

Now, in Biarritz, it feels fully in motion. Blazy is establishing codes at Chanel with remarkable speed and clarity: skeleton tweeds that introduce transparency and grid-like structure; flouncy skirts that incorporate straw or shimmer with sequins; shirts and trousers that masquerade as denim but reveal themselves, on closer inspection, is sequined knit. You start to recognise a Blazy-era Chanel look across a crowded room, which is no small achievement this early in his tenure.

This Cruise collection extends those ideas into a coastal vocabulary. Sailor references are present, but never literal; dissolving into washed cotton canvas suiting, fluttering silk foulards and raffia skirts that rustle audibly as they pass. The bathing suit – so central to Chanel’s original proposition of freedom – reappears here as a functional anchor around which the day’s dressing can orbit.

What struck me most, sitting there, was how sensorial the collection feels. The show’s notes speak of “fluid silks, springy tweeds, compact flocks, soft beaded knits, and shimmering fish-scale paillettes,” and for once, the language isn’t hyperbole. It was a delight to have a few models stop and pause amongst us viewers, allowing us a longer-than-a-flash soaking in of the detail and layers of the make.

That pleasure is also tied to a broader sense of inclusivity that Blazy is quietly but consistently embedding into Chanel’s image. His casting is diverse in age and race, if not yet fully in size, reflecting a more global, realistic customer base. First-time Chanel show-goer, French actor Sayyid El Alami, described his takeaway from the experience: “If I had to choose one word, it would be grace… all the models are incredible, because they’re women of different ages and different shapes – there’s even a pregnant woman. It’s exactly what Gabrielle was trying to do when she started: to give all women that freedom, that freedom of expression.” For a young man wearing the most classic white denim jeans, black sweater and brogues (“It’s all from Chanel's womenswear collection, and I love that!”), he’s hit the nail on the head with how he thinks about legacy. “There’s a word in French, ‘reprendre le flambeau’ – to take the torch. That’s what I feel he’s doing from Gabrielle, taking the legacy of what she did, which is quite difficult, maybe the most difficult thing. But he’s bringing it into the modern age, making it for today.” It aligns neatly with Blazy’s own assertion that in Biarritz, “everyone and everything shared the same stage, living together as a norm.”