Chanel’s Cruise 2026/27 show washes onto Sydney’s shores tomorrow, with the house releasing a tantalising first glimpse of what is to come. Announced back in June, the Sydney presentation will see the house re-stage its Cruise 2026/27 collection, which made its debut in Biarritz, France, on April 28.
Drawing inspiration from the ocean and embracing the languid rhythms of surf culture, the collection feels particularly at home in Sydney, a city whose own relationship with the water makes the connection seem almost inevitable.
In the teaser released today, Australian models Latahlia Hickling, Julia Nobis and Josephen Akuei are glimpsed traipsing along the shoreline, white-capped waves lapping behind them.
Akuei notably reprises her shimmering, amphibious ensemble, encrusted with sunburst-orange and gold paillettes, with orange plumage fluttering across her eyelids.
The collection saw jackets trimmed with marine motifs, logo’d swim caps and coral-like netting fashioned into dresses, conjuring a wardrobe attuned to life by the water, where the boundaries between land and sea seem delightfully blurred.
It was, perhaps, Matthieu Blazy’s most playful collection to date, bordering on the chimerical, further enlivened by a cast of wonderfully preposterous accessories: thigh-high rubber wading boots, earrings fashioned in the likeness of colourful algae and multi-legged sea creatures, and, of course, the now-iconic ‘shoes’, which comprised little more than a heel cap.
The latter seized the internet’s collective imagination, offering a particularly spirited contribution to fashion’s ongoing fascination with the freaky shoe.
There is something especially symbolic about Blazy’s preparedness to dip his toe into the wonderfully off-kilter. For centuries, the expansive and enigmatic ocean has served as a metaphor for collective imagination, memory and myth. And for Gabrielle Chanel, the seaside town of Biarritz on France’s Basque coast offered an escape from the constraints of etiquette and the rigid dictates of Parisian fashion.
It was here that she could surrender to a more instinctive, unencumbered way of living and, in turn, conceive an entirely new language of dress. In 1915, she established her couture house in Biarritz, a setting that would prove fertile ground for her radical sensibility.
The freedom of movement that would become so intrinsic to the Chanel lexicon found a natural expression in this ocean-facing world. And it is this spirit, animated by the elemental force of the sea and the particular joie de vivre of Biarritz, that finds renewed expression in the Cruise 2026/27 collection and its Sydney iteration.
Tomorrow’s presentation will bring the collection to Australian shores in a reprise that feels especially resonant. For Sydney, and Australia more broadly, it also represents an extraordinary moment of international recognition, with no other luxury house having staged a show of this magnitude on Australian soil.
