Haute Look: Matthieu Blazy’s First-Ever Chanel Cruise Collection

It’s no secret that the best fashion stories are the ones already written. Matthieu Blazy knows this — and for his first Cruise collection as Artistic Director of Fashion Activities at Chanel (the Chanel Cruise 2027 collection), he didn’t look far for inspiration. He went straight to Biarritz, the Basque coast city where Gabrielle Chanel opened her couture house and, in doing so, quietly rewrote the rules of what fashion could be.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of CHANEL

The collection, titled “Sous le salon la plage” — beneath the salon, the beach — is exactly that. A place where hierarchies dissolve, where the salon slips into the sand, and where the clothes have somewhere to be and the freedom to get there. Blazy frames Biarritz not as nostalgia but as a living reference point, a place where sailors and nobility, artists and workers shared the same stage without ceremony. That spirit is woven into every look.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of CHANEL

What makes this collection feel so considered is its range — and how naturally it all coheres. French workwear and grandeur sit side by side. The sailor’s marinière appears alongside shimmering fish-scale paillettes. Raffia skirts rustle next to washed cotton canvas suiting. Fluid silks, springy tweeds, soft beaded knits — the fabrications read as a direct response to the natural world surrounding Biarritz, abundant and sensory in equal measure. The Basque stripe runs through it all as a linking line, grounding the collection in its geography without ever feeling literal.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of CHANEL

The black dress opens the collection as look one, and the choice is deliberate. Blazy returns to Gabrielle Chanel’s original 1926 archival sketch, presenting the dress as the radical act it always was. It’s worth remembering that when Vogue called it Chanel’s “Ford” that same year, the compliment was in its democratizing power — a dress long worn by shopgirls and servants, elevated by craft and context into something every grand lady suddenly needed. The bow from the original drawing, notably absent from the widely distributed sketch? Transposed here into a clutch bag. The detail is small and entirely intentional.

The double C, too, is reframed — not as branding, but as architecture. Its sinuous contours, first radically introduced to clothing in the 1930s, are embedded in garments here as signature and manifesto both. As Blazy sees it, Gabrielle Chanel wrote her autobiography in attire. Now it’s the wearer’s turn to add her own chapter.

The accessories complete the picture with the same effortless range. A small valise handbag sits alongside a full-grown holdall. A waterproof flap bag alongside a giant striped beach panier. Shoes move between Art Deco elegance and barefoot “heel caps” — designed to take the wearer wherever she pleases, salon or shoreline. The jewelry echoes Biarritz’s Art Deco architecture and its life aquatic, shell earrings held to the ear, the Chanel pearl finding what Blazy calls its spiritual home.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of CHANEL

There is a clear thesis running through this collection — one Gabrielle Chanel established the moment she set up shop on the Basque coast and let the sea air into her work. Freedom of the body is freedom of the woman. Blazy has understood that completely, and in his first Cruise outing for the house, he’s made it feel as urgent and alive as it did a century ago.