Chanel stages cruise‑format pre‑Met curtain‑raiser to showcase top clients and creatives
- Chanel opened the cruise 2025/26 season at Villa d’Este on Lake Como, using a destination runway to gather celebrity ambassadors, filmmakers and clients. - The house showed 69 looks designed by its in-house studio, with Keira Knightley, Lupita Nyong’o, Sofia Coppola and Margaret Qualley in attendance. - The event came before Matthieu Blazy’s first Chanel cruise show in 2026, extending the brand’s client-spectacle playbook. (nytimes.com)
Chanel used its cruise 2025/26 show at Villa d’Este on Lake Como to assemble celebrity ambassadors, filmmakers and top clients in one pre–Met Gala-style display. (nytimes.com) (chanel.com) The show took place on April 29, 2025, in Cernobbio, Italy, at the storied hotel on the lake, and Chanel’s official site lists 69 looks from the collection. (wwd.com) (chanel.com) Women’s Wear Daily said the collection was designed by Chanel’s in-house team, with references to Luchino Visconti and Romy Schneider in “Boccaccio ’70.” (wwd.com) The guest list made the point as clearly as the clothes. WWD reported appearances by Keira Knightley, Lupita Nyong’o, Sofia Coppola and Margaret Qualley, turning the runway into a concentrated Chanel network event. (wwd.com) Cruise shows are not just seasonal previews; they are destination productions built around travel, hospitality and private selling. The New York Times described Chanel’s Lake Como event as a Met Gala “curtain raiser,” aimed at clients and creatives as much as editors. (nytimes.com) That timing mattered because Chanel was between creative eras. Virginie Viard had exited, and Matthieu Blazy had not yet made his Chanel runway debut when the Lake Como collection was shown. (wwd.com 1) (wwd.com 2) Chanel later repeated the cruise 2026 show in Singapore, another signal that the collection was built to travel and to meet customers outside Paris. WWD reported that stopover marked the house’s return to Singapore for a cruise event after Karl Lagerfeld’s 2013 show there. (wwd.com) The house has already pointed to the next chapter. Chanel says Matthieu Blazy’s first Chanel cruise collection will be shown in Biarritz for cruise 2026/27, tying the format back to one of Gabrielle Chanel’s earliest fashion addresses. (chanel.com) Lake Como, then, was not only a runway backdrop. It was a holding pattern, a client event and a brand-theater exercise before Chanel’s next creative reset. (nytimes.com) (chanel.com)
