Playful, Polished and Unmistakably On Brand: How Matthieu Blazy's First Chanel Cruise Show Champions Its Customer

Matthieu Blazy mania was strong enough to overshadow Paris Fashion Week—think hour-long queues outside stores and refined yet unrelenting shop-floor battles for shoes—so it goes without saying that the Artistic Director of Fashion Activities has more than silenced his critics since his Chanel appointment. His first Chanel Cruise 26/27 collection, shown in Biarritz, only strengthens his case further. The key word for the catwalk being: timeless.

The concern, Marie Claire Fashion Director Lily Russo-Bah reminds us, was that longstanding Chanel customers feared Blazy wouldn't meet their needs. That he would instead focus on a younger, more adventurous demographic. His response? To produce age-defying pieces and incorporate models of different generations into each show.

Take 50-year-old Stephanie Seymour, who opened the Chanel Autumn/Winter 2026 show, 58-year-old Nicole Kidman who is now the face of Chanel eyewear, and 65-year-old Tilda Swinton, recently dressed by the house for the BAFTAs, to name but a few of the women over 50 championed by the label.

All fall within the female demographic that Forbes reports accounts for 27% of all consumer spending. Dubbing the group "super consumers" and the wealthiest, most active generation in history. A demographic that is, albeit, often overlooked.

Not, it appears, by Blazy. And that message carried through Cruise 26/27. Of the collection, he writes: “Chanel found in Biarritz different ways of being and seeing, of movement and freedom. She made them her fashion pedestal. It is a place that offers the perfect balance between function and fiction. Among artists, workers, nobility, sailors and the natural world, everyone and everything shared the same stage, living together as a norm. All had a role to play.”

The looks are a mix of playful statement pieces—Basque stripe shirts, raffia skirts and vintage-inspired bathing suits that play with the seaside theme of undressing—alongside elements of the natural world rendered in silks, fish-scale sequins and beaded knits. And then the classic signatures, sure to satisfy any longstanding Chanel lover: tasteful tweeds, well-cut workwear and reinventions of the iconic logo into an attention-grabbing collar.

The aim echoes Gabrielle Chanel's own mission when she opened her first Couture House in Biarritz. "Helping to free women from the literal constraints of convention found in a salon-bound existence, it was the world of the outdoors, of the elements, of the sea, the beach, the sun and the wind, that demanded practicality and comfort in movement," reads the show notes.

Through folklore-inspired mermaid dresses, pieces that transcend eras and models of all ages—among them a six-months-pregnant Kaya Wilkins—it seems Chanel and Blazy have done just that.