Cruise 2026, Chanel in Biarritz. Ten looks that held the room, and one that suggests the maison’s idea has finally reached the shoreline.

Biarritz in May, the light off the Atlantic at six o’clock turns silver before it turns rose.

Le Casino Municipal; the Art Deco room Chanel rebuilt for the night, with floor-to-ceiling mirrors as a nod to the Maison’s historic boutique in the city, held that light like a glass. The soundtrack came on, strings layered low against sea air, and the first model walked. She was wearing a 1926 black dress.

Reissued by Matthieu Blazy in his first cruise as creative director, on the centenary of the look Vogue once baptised “Chanel’s Ford”; clean lines, dropped waist, no ornament. As thesis statements go, very tidy. The collection’s title, Sous Le Salon, La Plage, told the rest of the move: lift the rug of Chanel’s Parisian living room and find sand.

The looks that followed unspooled the Maison’s last hundred years and retied them to the sea. Nautical reds, navies, ecru. Breton stripes scaled to evening, in silk chiffon, cut for dinner not the deck. Sequin paillettes shimmering on suiting like wet mermaid scales. A 1920s logo motif, recovered from the archive in Blazy’s sketchbook, curled around the double-C and reappeared on a quilted clutch. There were branded swim caps. There were starfish embroidered on a tweed jacket. There were shell-shaped earrings. The mermaid metaphor was layered thick, and Blazy refused to apologise for it.

The strongest single move was a navy-and-ecru striped silk-chiffon evening suit, cut for an evening on land. The most-photographed run was the mid-show mermaid sequence, sequinned tailoring under reef-coloured embroidery, swim cap as crown. The closer was a lamé evening dress that rendered the sea as fabric. It walked, the room exhaled, and Caroline de Maigret, in row two, did not get up.

Coveteur called it dreamy. WWD was warmer than expected. Grazia named it a mermaid dispatch for the girls who played mermaids at the beach. Another read Blazy as anchoring himself, sensibly, to the natural-world thread that has run through Chanel since the Coromandel screen and the wheat sheaf. The strongest looks were the suiting, where Blazy’s Bottega-trained restraint flickered through. The weakest were two or three of the costume-coded pieces, which read Halloween at the wrong angle. Cruise is allowed to be theatrical. It is also allowed to be wearable. He has not yet decided which Chanel he wants to be but it is, importantly, his to decide.

After the lights came up, Blazy stepped out from behind the runway curtain in a navy Breton sweater, took the room’s applause for thirty seconds, and walked back the way he came. The light off the Atlantic by then had gone the colour of a pearl.