By SETH KHOURI
There are few Maisons that remain tethered to a singular place or idea. Most move fluidly across a shifting landscape of archetypes, references, and settings, allowing each collection to adopt a renewed sense of character season after season. It’s a language of both constant renewal, and seasonal amnesia. Chanel has never quite subscribed to that rhythm. Not out of reluctance, nor a dependence on familiarity, but because there’s something steadier at play. You feel it first in the expected places, in the house’s ongoing return to the Grand Palais, that vast, echoing stage for its modern identity. But for Resort ’27, Matthieu Blazy shifts the gaze elsewhere, trading the cavernous halls of ready-to-wear with the coastal cliffs of Biarritz, transporting his audience back to the birthplace of the ever so acclaimed Maison.
Nestled along the edge of Spain, Biarritz became a point of quiet retreat during World War I, a meeting place for aristocrats and artists seeking distance from the unrest in Paris. In 1915, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel arrived on its shores, stepping into a landscape where city-wear softened into leisure, and local Basque dress moved with an ease absent from Parisian codes. It was here, in this unlikely convergence that Chanel observed an emulsion of function and elegance, and from it, began to shape the foundations of her own label.
While steeped in the past, Blazy’s offering held firmly in the present, its execution sharp, deliberate. Swim caps, coral appliqués, and voluminous skirts, echoing the geometry of beach umbrellas, danced alongside knits traced with fish, straw fringe, and scattered seashells, each detail reinforcing Blazy’s coastal through-line across the seventy-nine looks. The colour story followed suit. Rupturing the opening triptych of black, the palette gave way to the vibrancy of a coral reef: a wash of cyan, cherry red, bubblegum pink, and emerald green, among others. Elsewhere, sand-toned dresses and pared-back two-piece sets surfaced.
Look 26 arrived in a wash of sequined cyan–a button-down and matching trouser set that caught the light with each step. The shirt was worn undone, falling open to a deep V, where a stark white bodysuit cut through the saturation. It was grounded by a pair of flats in the aforementioned sequined cyan and a camel suede clutch, a quiet counterpoint to the sheen. Most striking, though, was the beauty: the model’s eyes extended outward in delicate strokes, shaped to mirror the ventral fins of an angelfish, an ever-so-subtle, yet precise reference. Look 79 subverted the narrative. A sleeveless V-neck black dress. Its form was fitted to caress the body until freedom flowed below the waist. Situated firmly just below the bellybutton rested a voluminous bow, its excess fabric providing movement with each step. Across the surface, delicate swashes of colour drifted, less literal than impressionistic, like light refracting through water, or the fleeting shimmer of something just beneath the surface.
Blazy’s talent, of course, lies in his ability to hold wearability and tradition in quiet alignment. In doing so, he carves out a space that feels equally attuned to Chanel’s established clientele and a newer, more discerning audience. Take the red and cream skirt-and-blouse pairing of Look 16: measured in its proportions, yet alive in its distortion, with a slit running up the right leg held firmly in place by three golden buttons. Or the black-and-white dress of Look 23, which distills the house’s codes into something succinct, almost instinctive. In both, Blazy doesn’t disrupt tradition so much as recalibrate it, allowing it to move forward without ever severing its roots.
In returning to Biarritz, Blazy resists the temptation to romanticise, instead treating it as a living reference point, something to be reworked rather than revered. Where others might seek reinvention through distance, Blazy finds it in return, in tracing the same line, but with a steadier hand. Resort ’27 doesn’t ask to be read as a departure, but as a continuation, one that sharpens rather than softens the house’s identity.
