Chanel Cruise 2027
- Camz
- Apr 30
- 5 min read
Matthieu Blazy comes home to the sand
For his first cruise show at Chanel, Matthieu Blazy returned to where it all began and we're not only talking about his own childhood.
By the Camz editorial team  · Paris, April 2026
Sand as scenery, the sea as starting point
There is something quite extraordinary, let's say it plainly, about laying a sand-coloured carpet at the edge of the very beach where you used to run as a child. And yet that is precisely what Matthieu Blazy did for his first cruise show at Chanel, in Biarritz — city of his summer holidays, city of the founder, city that still smells of the Atlantic and the early twentieth century if you close your eyes at the right moment. The carpet was beige, almost sandy in texture, and the models walked along it as though the tide had just retreated to make room for them. At Chanel, history is always the first accessory of the collection, and here it was worn with an almost disarming lightness.
Because that is Blazy's singular talent : he knows his references by heart, holds them close, and then releases them as if nothing could be simpler, so that the clothes are free to breathe. His mood boards overflowed with Art Deco posters, Picasso in a marinière, DalÃ, Churchill playing on the beach, and a mysterious young woman in a fancy-dress costume made entirely of newspapers. The result had nothing of a lecture delivered in costume — it was a stroll.
A collection like an aquarium with very good taste
The first silhouettes set the tone immediately : the sea had quite literally slipped inside the embroideries. Coral, starfish, sea anemone fronds transformed into braiding, shells turned into earrings, a gold fish-scale coat that moved through the light like a living creature. We are not talking here about the naive nautical prints you find in harbour gift shops, this is exceptional craftsmanship, haute couture embroidery representing thousands of hours of work, which, once worn, looks as though it cost nothing more than a few lovely hours by the water. The Chanel paradox in all its splendour.
Beach umbrella forms reappeared as voluminous skirts, striped towels reincarnated as graphic suits, and giant oversized straw baskets completed silhouettes that could have belonged to an elegant woman of the 1930s just as easily as to a contemporary woman in a hurry to catch the sun. An aquarium of taste, inhabited, joyful, and never, ever vulgar. Chanel remains Chanel.
"It's waterproof. You can swim in it!" — Matthieu Blazy, presenting his sea-blue resin Chanel bag.
The little black dress turns one hundred, and she looks incredible
The show opened with Blazy's own take on the little black dress — a shift cut into a deep V-neckline, its drop-waist shape emphasised by lines of white geometric stitching, as though the garment carried its own graphic structure from within. At the back, an enormous bow — a direct discovery from an original housed at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which Blazy had gone to examine in person. That monumental bow, converted into a tiny clutch nestled inside it, is exactly the kind of find that makes the difference between a good collection and a great one : the humour is there, the savoir-faire too, and the gesture remains entirely elegant.
The little black dress is celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year — it was in 1926 that American Vogue christened Chanel's invention the "Little Black Dress" in a now-iconic sketch. Blazy did not miss the opportunity to recall the political audacity of that garment at the time : a young couturière of modest origins absorbing the uniform of housemaids, of the working classes, and presenting it as high fashion before it became the style symbol of every woman. "A revenge on her old social condition," he said. One hundred years later, the dress still carries that ambivalence.
The tweed suit at the lunch on the grass
What is perhaps most remarkable about Blazy's work at Chanel, besides the fact that he appears to be genuinely enjoying himself, which is not as common as one might hope in the great houses, is the way he makes the most formal garments feel absolutely easy to wear. The classic tweed suit rediscovered here a modern suppleness, a certain nonchalance in the way it was carried, a je-ne-sais-quoi of casual confidence that sacrificed nothing in the way of allure. The slightly cropped jacket, the trousers cut with precise proportions : one understands immediately why editors, stylists, and clients have been storming Chanel boutiques since Blazy took the reins.
Ticking-stripe overshirts, worn-in cotton drill khaki skirt suits with bags to match, this is everyday Chanel, the kind you do not take too seriously but wear very often. Even a plain striped quarter-zip sweater found its way into the collection, without the slightest apology. After all, it was Chanel herself who borrowed the marinière from the sailors or perhaps, as Blazy suspects, from Pablo Picasso, who was wandering around Biarritz in his own striped sweater at precisely the same time. "There was always this idea of borrowing." One hundred years later, we are still borrowing, just with considerably more tweed.
At night, the mermaids wear Chanel
The evening silhouettes arrived bathed in the light of a room entirely flooded with brightness, and they did not disappoint. Swimwear and swim caps inspired by the 1920s mingled with fluid mermaid dresses and silk scarf dresses that floated with the weightlessness of a seaside daydream.
There was lattice lace shaped after the trees of Biarritz covering an entire suit, an invitation to look closely at the pieces and discover their extraordinary details only upon approach. The gilded sandals, meanwhile, had one particular detail worth noting : only the heel existed. The front of the foot was left bare, free, as though the shoe had decided to finish its holidays early.
And then, towards the end of the show, came the newspaper-print ball dress, an idea that Blazy situated within a long and illustrious genealogy, from the suffragettes to Schiaparelli, from John Galliano to Jean Paul Gaultier by way of Per Spook. But his reason for bringing it to Chanel came from a quote by Gabrielle herself : "I love to read newspapers, like men." One could hardly choose a better starting point.
A resin bag and a generation of convinced customers
In the preview, Blazy had pulled out his latest creation : a new iteration of the quilted Chanel bag, made in sea-blue resin with lattice-work inspired by his research into Biarritz. Waterproof, he said with a smile. You can swim in it.
The quip says a great deal about the direction he is seeking to bring to the house : a luxury that does not hold itself hostage, that accepts being worn, being tested, accompanying a real life rather than supervising it from behind a display case.
